The Forgotten Sister

by Caroline Bond

  The nurse smiled, too. ‘I’ll let you have a few minutes together, then I’ll be back and we’ll get you moved out of the treatment area.’ She whisked away, back into the melee of other people’s demands.

  ‘Erin, what the hell’s going on? What were you doing in a car with Ryan Newsome?’

  Grace cut across Tom. ‘Are you in a lot of pain?’

  Erin gripped her mum’s hand even tighter and whispered, ‘It’s not too bad. Oh, Mum, it was awful. The car hit something, then it spun, round and round. I thought it was never going to stop. It felt like my neck was going to snap.’

  ‘Erin…what were you doing in his car?’ Tom asked again.

  With the brace restricting her head, she couldn’t turn towards her father. ‘I was with Cassie.’

  ‘So we gather.’ Tom’s economy of words masked a whirlpool of emotions.

  But Erin was still reliving the crash. ‘There was glass everywhere. Ryan was shouting that his leg was trapped. I couldn’t get my seatbelt off at first. It felt like it had gone through my ribs. Cassie had blood all over her hands and her face, and she was crying. Where is she? Is she all right? Mum? Where’s Cassie? They took her off somewhere after we arrived. I couldn’t even ring you. I think we left everything in the car.’ The panic in Erin’s voice escalated.

  ‘She’s all right. She’s out in the main waiting area, worrying about you. She might need a few stitches, for the cut on her forehead.’ Grace saw Erin’s eyes widen in fear. ‘But she’s been thoroughly checked over and she’s okay. Honestly, Erin, she’s just a bit bashed up. I think it looks worse than it is.’

  ‘And than it could’ve been.’ Tom felt like he was wading through a deep pool of ignorance, getting further out of his depth. He’d had no idea Erin had even met Ryan, no idea they’d been hanging out together, but even that didn’t make sense. Why would Cassie take her little sister with her on a date? The fact that both of his daughters had been lying to him cut deep – especially Erin. It was so out of character. Cassie’s influence?

  In the midst of her own frazzled emotions, Erin picked up on her father’s distress. When he reached out to touch her the second time, she leant into rather than away from him. He stroked her hair silently for a few seconds, composing himself, then he tried one more time. ‘Erin, honey, please, you have to tell us… What were you doing in the car with Cassie and Ryan? Where were you going?’

  Erin turned her face a tiny fraction towards him, but with the brace holding her chin so unnaturally high, it was difficult. ‘We weren’t going anywhere. We were coming back.’

  ‘From where?’ Tom asked.

  Erin paused, considering the price that would have to be paid for her answer. She decided, after everything that had happened, that it was worth it. ‘Manchester.’

  There was beat of silence.

  The sounds of the hospital expanded to fill the void: footsteps, calm, reassuring voices, the crash of a trolley, the clatter of metal implements.

  Tom looked at Grace and she stared back at him, as they simultaneously realised how little they knew about their daughters’ lives, and how dangerous that ignorance had become.

  Chapter 57

  THEY DIDN’T get back home until the early hours of the morning.

  Five hours. No time at all, in the grand scheme of things, and yet it felt like a lifetime to Tom and Grace. The call from the hospital, the police officer’s guarded concern (and suspicion), the news of the crash, Erin’s fear and, even more disturbing, Cassie’s absolute, resolute silence. It was difficult to absorb the shock of it all. What was worse was that they both knew the night’s events weren’t the end of it, they were just the beginning.

  Manchester.

  Cassie’s hunt for her birth mother.

  This was the reckoning.

  Anxiety reverberated through Tom and Grace as they crept around like burglars in their own home. Grace followed closely in the girls’ wake, wanting to help, but not knowing how, as they quietly got ready for bed. Tom stayed downstairs, locking doors and turning off lights. Closing the stable door... But at least the sound of Erin and Cassie moving around upstairs was proof that his daughters were back in his care, although Tom now knew that their physical presence was no guarantee that they were truly safe.

  On the way home in the car Cassie and Erin had both seemed drugged, possibly by the pain relief, but also by the shock. Tom had watched them in the mirror. They’d not said a word, but he saw how they held onto each other, their fingers meshed tightly together. There was a pact between them, secrets shared and guarded – secrets that, in morning, would have to be faced.

  Upstairs the noises faded and the house fell silent. Only then did Tom wearily climb the stairs and get into bed beside his wife. But sleep was impossible. The physical damage done to his daughters haunted him. Erin’s thin frame had looked almost deformed, encased in the cumbersome neck brace, and Cassie’s bloody and battered face had been barely recognisable. It was if their pain had entered his body. A few miles faster, a worse spin, a different impact and they could have been killed. The ache in his bones deepened. Ryan Newsome had very nearly robbed Tom of his family. He could, at this moment, be childless, again.

  Manchester.

  Tom rolled over onto his side. How had Newsome got involved in the whole adoption mess? And Erin? How on earth had Erin ended up with them? Such ignorance. What sort of father knew so little about his own children? A failing one. Tom rolled over again, binding himself tighter in the grip of his own shame.

  Grace started awake in the darkness, shaken by a panic-filled dream that had felt all too real. Her heart was racing. She lay listening out for her girls, like she used to when they were little and she’d wake in the middle of the night just before they needed her, attuned to their unpredictable rhythms and irregular wants. But there were no voices, no muffled crying, no demands for attention. The house was silent. Even Tom, after hours of restlessness, seemed to be asleep. Grace tried to relax, but she couldn’t, her heart rate wouldn’t settle. She gave up, swung her legs over the side of the mattress and padded out onto the landing. She listened again – still nothing.

  She went to check on Cassie first, climbing up to the top of the house, not counting the steps, she knew there were fifteen. Outside Cassie’s door she stopped and listened, expecting the sounds of congested breathing – her poor face, it was such a mess – but all was quiet. Grace gently eased down the handle, pushed open the door and slipped inside. Cassie hadn’t bothered pulling down the skylight blinds and the room was bathed in moonlight. Grace looked at the rumpled bed and immediately saw that it was empty. The splinters of fear left over from her dream dug into her. Although she knew it was pointless, she crossed the room and lifted the duvet, but of course Cassie wasn’t hiding under it. She wasn’t three any more. She wasn’t a hot little body, curled up into a solid knot of flesh and blood, safe and sound. Grace turned and hurried down the stairs. Think logically: Cassie must be in the bathroom. But she wasn’t, the door was wide open, the room empty. Grace told herself to calm down, but her fears sharpened and stung, regardless.

  She pushed open Erin’s door and peered into the darkness.

  It took Grace a moment to realise what she was looking at it.

  Erin was propped against her pillows, her head held unnaturally upright by the neck brace. The duvet was pulled up around her and her eyes were closed. She was obviously fast asleep, despite her awkward position. Lying beside her was Cassie, curled up on the edge of the bed, the duvet barely covering her. All Grace could see was the curve of her back, the soles of her feet and her mass of hair. She was tucked in beside Erin, like a boat sheltering in the lee of a harbour wall.

  Grace’s relief was bitter-sweet.

  Her girls were home, not lost.

  They were hurt, but they would heal.

  But they hadn’t turned to her for comfort and protection.

  They had turned to each other.

  Chapter 58

  THE HOUSE
phone was ringing again. A fresh burst of adrenaline pumped into Tom’s bloodstream. He picked up on the second ring. It was a different police officer, following up on the previous night’s events. She enquired briefly after the girls, then gave Tom an update on what they had ascertained so far. A statement had been taken from Ryan at the hospital. Apparently it was light on detail. He was maintaining that he’d simply been giving the girls a lift home, at their request. He was denying that he’d seen the police car and was insisting that the crash had been an accident. There’d been no trace of alcohol or drugs in his system. His mother had confirmed that he’d had her permission to drive the vehicle, although she’d been unable to provide any evidence that he was insured to do so. When asked to clarify what they’d all been doing in Manchester, and why Erin was in the car, Ryan had refused to say.

  ‘He said to ask Cassie – more than once.’ The officer paused as if expecting Tom, as the parent of ‘said Cassie’, to be able to supply further illumination on the topic, but Tom said nothing. What could he say? She went on. ‘We’re trying to find someone to come and take the girls’ statements, sooner rather than later, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you when that will be at present.’ She seemed keen to wrap up their one-sided conversation. ‘If you’ve no further questions, Mr Haines?’

  ‘No,’ Tom said. ‘Thank you. We’ll wait to hear from you.’ He put down the phone and relayed the news to Grace. He had lied to the officer. Of course he had questions, he had hundreds of them, but Ryan had been right about one thing: the only person who had the answers was Cassie.

  They climbed up to her room together. Grace knocked. Tom walked in, without waiting for a response. She was sitting on the floor, in front of her mirror, tentatively dabbing make-up onto her bruised face. Her eyes met theirs in the glass. ‘We need to talk.’

  She paused, mid-daub. ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes. Now.’

  She carefully screwed the lid back on the tube of foundation and put it into her make-up bag, which she zipped shut. Only then did she shuffle round to face them.

  Tom took the desk chair, Grace the bed. ‘Cassie, what were you doing in Manchester?’

  Cassie gently touched her damaged face, her fingers probing the puffy, ragged skin, playing for time. ‘I wasn’t in Manchester,’ she said eventually.

  Tom had had enough. ‘Cassie! We need to know what you were doing last night? Tell us!’

  Cassie lowered her hand. ‘I was with my sister.’

  Tom’s mouth tightened. ‘That’s another issue altogether. What, in God’s name, was Erin doing in the car with you and Ryan?’

  Cassie’s gaze didn’t waver. She looked at her father through her normal and her swollen eye, deciding what to say. There was nothing to stop her now. No tentative allegiances to defend, no conflicting loyalties to honour. Leah had made it very clear. She’d insisted that Cassie choose: family or sister. It was a stark and unfair demand, but Leah had made it anyway. She was never going to allow Cassie to have both. The raging black resentment inside her wouldn’t permit it. The years of denial and deceit had damaged Leah too much – Tom and Grace had damaged Leah too much.

  And Cassie – bruised and broken as she was by the previous night’s events – was at least wiser and less naïve now. She knew, with painful clarity, that the two halves of her life were never going fit together.

  It was time for the truth.

  ‘I don’t mean Erin.’

  Grace and Tom stared at her, comprehension blooming on their shocked faces, as Cassie, very coldly and precisely, said, ‘I was with Leah!’

  Chapter 59

  THUMP! JUST like that.

  Their blindness was shameful.

  Their culpability absolute.

  Tom let out an ‘Oh’. It was such a weak reaction, but he was too wrong-footed to say anything else. Leah. Not her birth mother. Her sister. His sense of failure was complete.

  Grace looked at their battered daughter and felt the dam break. The pressure that had been building for weeks finally ruptured. Now for the flood. ‘We can explain,’ Grace said, although she wasn’t at all sure that they could.

  ‘Can you?’ Cassie’s gaze was frighteningly direct.

  Tom faced the challenge in her eyes with something that felt very much like fear; a visceral fear that nothing he could say would ever repair the damage they’d done to their relationship with Cassie. But he had to try. He had to get her to see that they’d kept Leah’s existence a secret for valid reasons. ‘She was a risk to herself, and to other people.’ He swallowed. ‘We were led to believe that she might be a risk to you.’ Cassie didn’t move, didn’t even blink, she simply waited for more. ‘That’s why we never told you about her. We thought it was for the best.’ He sounded uncertain, even to his own ears.

  ‘You thought you had the right not to tell me that I had a sister.’

  Tom looked at his feet. There had been legitimate reasons, at the time, but they didn’t seem so valid now.

  Grace ran her fingers nervously along the chain around her neck. ‘We know now that our decision was wrong.’

  ‘Wrong!’ Cassie snapped. The atmosphere in the room darkened. Tom and Grace waited for the explosion of her anger, but – for what felt like for ever – Cassie said nothing. The silence was worse than her letting rip.

  ‘How did you get in touch with her?’ Tom eventually asked.

  ‘Facebook.’ Cassie’s voice was so quiet they had to lean forward to hear what she was saying. ‘I put out an appeal for information. Leah saw it. Messaged me. Said she wanted to meet. So we met. Weeks ago.’

  They hadn’t even considered that Cassie might take things into her own hands; though Gail had warned them, Grace remembered – now that it was too late. Tom was struggling to let go of the version of what was supposed to have happened. ‘We were told that she’d declined any contact.’

  ‘Yes, well, you’re not the only ones who are capable of lying.’

  Grace winced, but accepted the judgement. The torrent of things they didn’t know crashed down on both of them. How many times had Cassie met Leah? When had they met? Where? What the hell had been going on all these weeks while they’d been blindly, stupidly waiting for things to blow over?

  Cassie’s voice wobbled. ‘How could you? All those years. And then – and this is what I really can’t get my head round – when I started asking about my adoption, you still lied.’

  ‘To protect you,’ Tom said, but as he looked at Cassie’s mangled face, he had to acknowledge how badly that had worked out. ‘So you were with her last night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Manchester.’

  ‘She lives in Oldham.’ Cassie no longer felt the need to keep Leah’s secrets.

  ‘And?’ Tom prompted.

  That’s when Cassie flared. ‘Don’t you dare! You don’t get to ask anything about my relationship with Leah. Not after what you did. You’ve been lying to me my whole life. You say you did it to protect me? Sod that! You did it to protect yourselves. I had a right to know. She was my sister. She still is my sister.’ Cassie let her anger loose. ‘She told me all about us being together, when we were little. She was the one who looked after me. You knew about that, didn’t you? Didn’t you? But that didn’t fit in with the version of my life that you wanted to peddle, did it? So you pretended that she didn’t exist.’ She was shouting now. ‘You knew all about her, from the very beginning. You could’ve taken her as well. You should have. We could’ve been together. Then it would all have been different… She would’ve been different.’

  The floorboards on the landing creaked.

  They all stopped.

  ‘Erin?’ Grace called. ‘It’s okay.’

  The door swung open and Erin shuffled into the room, her gait affected by the neck brace. She was in her dressing gown, her feet bare, her hair a mess.

  Cassie gestured for her to come in. ‘Come on in. Sit down. You’ve as much right to know about this as me. We’re just getting to the bit where Mu
m and Dad try and explain why they totally lied about Leah.’

  Erin lowered herself down onto the bed, next to Grace.

  ‘Cassie…’ Tom started, but she held up her hand.

  ‘No! Not you! I want Mum to tell it.’ Tom sat back as if he’d been shoved. ‘And this time, Mum, I want the truth, not some fairy story.’

  They all looked at Grace.

  A bird flew across the sky, right above the skylight, and for a second its shadow flitted across the room. Grace took the moment to compose herself, aware that what she was about to say would damn them, in Cassie’s eyes, and yet knowing, at the same time, that it had to be told – at last.

  She started at the beginning.

  ‘It took nearly two years for us to be cleared to adopt. Even after we’d been approved, we had to wait for months and months while they looked for a match. We started to think it would never happen, that we would never become parents. Then it did. They matched us with you. It was one of the happiest days of our lives.’ As she said it, she took hold of Erin’s hand. The other happiest day, but that was not for now. ‘The minute we saw your photo, we fell in love with you.’ That much was true – totally, undeniably true. ‘But there were complications.’

  Cassie snorted. ‘Leah?’

  ‘Yes, Leah.’ The room stilled. Grace held her daughter’s gaze, waiting for the condemnation that she knew they deserved.

  ‘So Leah was telling the truth. You split us up.’

  Tom leant forward again as if about to say something, but nothing came into his mind that would help. Grace glanced at him, then very clearly and quietly said, ‘Yes, we did.’