Jess’s stomach somersaults beneath the elasticated waistband of her bottle-green skirt. She feels the blood pulsing at her wrists, trying to force her to confront the possibility of what has taken place inside that bedroom. Her heart pounds as if her body is urging her into action. She imagines taking a step forward and pushing Lily aside, a struggle in which she manages – against Lily’s advanced years and superior strength – to emerge victorious. But thoughts of what might happen afterwards – what she might see and what she might learn – cement her feet to the floor.
The alarm on Lily’s digital watch beeps. Lily jerks her hand to turn it off and Jess feels herself flinch. She knows it is Lily’s 8.30 a.m. alarm, the one her sister has set to ensure they leave for school on time now that their parents are too distracted to remind them. Lily holds Jess’s gaze for a few seconds more until Jess is the first to turn her head away. Jess begins to make her way down the stairs, and only then does she realise that her legs are trembling. She hears Lily’s footsteps close on her heels but does not turn around. She cannot bear to see that look on Lily’s face again: a look that has told Jess something she does not want to know.
All the way down, Jess contemplates finding her mum, telling her where Lily has been, what she thinks has taken place inside that bedroom. But by the time Jess reaches the bottom stair, she knows she cannot. To tell her mum would be to voice suspicions Jess is not yet ready to assert, things she does not, at the age of ten, have the courage to say out loud.
Jess can barely breathe as she opens the front door. She has passed the day in a trance, the fear of what she might discover when she gets home churning in her stomach. As she walks through the door, anxiety scratches at her skin.
Stepping into the hallway, there is a stillness, as though her entry has disrupted the most delicate of equilibriums. She stops and listens, and it is then that she hears the noise that causes her heart to drum in her chest.
It is the sound of her mum crying. Not the quiet, muffled sobs Jess has become accustomed to in recent months, but noisy, uninhibited, primitive cries.
And in those few, potent seconds between entering the house and her dad opening the sitting room door and ushering her inside, Jess experiences a moment of clarity she has never known before.
She knows, immediately, that Zoe is dead. She knows that what she saw this morning – Lily standing outside Zoe’s door, face flushed with guilt, hands clutching the door handle, refusing Jess entry as if her innocence depended on it – was the aftermath of something so awful that to think about it makes Jess feel as though her heart is being clamped in a vice. She knows, as she enters the sitting room and falls into her mum’s arms, that in spite of the way her mum holds her tightly, rocks her back and forth, says I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, over and over again, it is not her mum or her dad or even leukaemia that is to blame for Zoe’s death. It is Lily.
What Jess understands as she cocoons herself inside her mum’s embrace – as hot, fat tears stream down her cheeks – is that she has lost not one sister today but two. She has lost the twin with whom her life has been inextricably linked since before they were born. Without her, Jess knows she will never feel complete again. But as grief squeezes her throat and blood pounds in her ears, she understands that Zoe is not the only sister she has lost today. She knows that she will never forgive Lily for what she has done. As of today, she is not one of three siblings but an only child.
The remainder of the afternoon passes in a blur and yet, in years to come, Jess will remember fragments of it in such microscopic detail it is as though her brain had been set on automatic timer, capturing individual frames at regular intervals: sitting next to Lily on the dusky pink sofa in the sitting room, flinching every time Lily tries to touch her, speak to her, catch her eye; the sound of murmured voices from the kitchen below rising up through the floorboards like audible phantoms, conversations Jess wants neither to be a part of nor excluded from; the front door opening and closing, anonymous footsteps padding along the hallway, some heading upstairs, others down; Mrs Sheppard popping her permed head around the sitting room door, exchanging silent communications with Lily that Jess is on the verge of being able to decipher but cannot yet decode; Lily trying to comfort her when all Jess wants is to shout at her: I know what you did and I will never, ever forgive you.
Shortly before the time they would normally have dinner, her mum comes into the sitting room and Lily leaves, saying she needs the bathroom. Jess knows that this is her chance to disclose what she saw, perhaps the only opportunity she will have all day.
She feels the revelation scorch her tongue, knows she must tell her mum what Lily has done. Her lips part, the accusation fizzing impatiently in her mouth.
But then, next to her, she hears her mum’s chest heaving, followed by the most terrible, keening howl Jess has ever heard. Her mum holds Jess tight in her arms, and sobs ferociously until Jess’s dad comes in to rescue them both.
Jess feels her lips close against an unspeakable truth.
She will tell her mum later, she thinks, when there are not so many people around, when the stillness is no longer punctured by grief and her mum’s face has reverted to its normal shape.
Later, Jess thinks. Later she will be able to unburden herself of this terrible knowledge.
Two and a half weeks have passed since Zoe’s death. The funeral has been and gone. The four remaining members of Jess’s family move among one another like ghosts, unable – or unwilling – to acknowledge each other’s grief.
Their mum has not yet returned to work and Jess has begun to speculate that perhaps she never will. Perhaps she will spend every day, for ever more, in her bedroom crying into the duvet, as though the muffled sound does not travel through doors and walls, into Jess’s bedroom with its redundant bunk beds where Jess has got used to plugging her fingers in her ears every night.
Today Jess sits cross-legged on the sofa watching Blue Peter. The presenters are in Russia, a country which seems so far away that it might as well be a foreign planet, but Jess likes the look of its grand palaces and deep blue rivers, and wonders whether she might, one day, see it for herself. She scratches at a gnat bite on her bare leg: she is wearing shorts and a T-shirt in honour of sports day earlier at school, Jess the only pupil without either parent to cheer her on. Her hand digs into the biscuit packet for her fourth chocolate digestive of the afternoon.
The door opens and as Lily walks into the room, Jess feels her stomach whirl like the drum of a washing machine.
‘What are you watching, Jess?’
Jess ignores her and stares straight ahead at the TV.
‘Jess? Did you hear me?’
Jess feels her heart thumping and hopes Lily cannot hear it. She does not want to give herself away, does not want Lily to guess what she knows, not before Jess has found the right time to tell their mum. But this is what happens now, whenever she and Lily are alone in a room together: Jess’s body threatens to betray her. She does not know whether it is because she is scared she may say something she shouldn’t, or because she knows what her sister is capable of.
Lily flops down on the sofa next to her and Jess instinctively shifts a few inches to the left.
‘Are you OK, Jess? Look, I know how hard this is – especially with Mum being how she is right now – but things will get easier, I promise.’
Lily’s voice sounds different, as though she is trying on grown-up reassurance for size and discovering that it doesn’t quite fit.
‘Jess, please talk to me. I know how you feel. We’re all grieving. We’re all going through the same thing. I know it’s worse for you because you two were so close, but you might feel better if you talk about it.’
Jess does not know what it is that finally provokes her to ask the question that has been burning her tongue for eighteen days, but suddenly there it is between them before she has a chance to stop it.
‘What happened in Zoe’s bedroom that day?’ Her voice sounds bolder than she had imagined it would.
‘What day? What are you talking about?’
‘The day Zoe died.’