‘So you’re saying that if I hadn’t cut you out of my life, you’d have told me the truth?’
Lily was about to nod but then she replayed Jess’s question, dug deeper for an answer. An image shuttered in her mind like the split-second opening of a camera lens: arriving home that day to the parked police car on the kerb outside, her heart rising into her throat as she walked through the hallway and into the sitting room to find her mum and Jess locked in grief. A look on her mum’s face not only of shock and horror but of something else too: fear wrapped in a guilt so thick that Lily couldn’t imagine her mum ever being free of it.
‘Honestly? I don’t know. It wasn’t my confession to make. And Mum obviously didn’t want us to know or she’d have told us herself. And can you really blame her? Think what could have happened if anyone had found out.’
‘What’s that got to do with you telling me? What do you think I’d have done if I’d known? Gone to the police? For God’s sake, Lily, don’t you credit me with any integrity at all? I’ve never told anyone what I thought you’d done. I’d have never put Mum in jeopardy like that.’
‘I’m not saying you would. I’m just saying it wasn’t my story to tell.’
They both fell silent. Lily thought about her mum in Central Park, wondering where she was, whether she was back at the hotel yet, feeling a stab of panic that she shouldn’t have left her alone.
‘Did you never tell anyone? Not even Daniel?’
Lily shook her head and looked down at the table, noticing how the grain of the wood rippled across its surface. There had been so many moments when she’d considered confiding in Daniel, but each time the fear of exposing her mum had stopped her. Now Lily wondered whether it had always been there in her marriage, wedged between them, whether any relationship could survive a secret like that.
Lily thought back to that morning in the school toilets – less than half an hour after watching her mum give Zoe the overdose – grieving for a death she wasn’t yet supposed to know had happened. A death she had been convinced was all her fault. She had not known then that she would spend the next three decades striving for perfection as a means of smothering her guilt. She had not known that she would study with a feverish commitment to get the A-level grades needed for Oxford, or that throughout her three years at university she would make no lasting friendships, allow herself no romantic encounters. She had not known that she would immerse herself in her studies as a distraction from her thoughts, a tactic she would employ for many years to come, professional approbation filling the gaping void where her family should have been. She had presented a picture to the world of a life and a career so unblemished there had been days she had almost managed to believe it herself.
In lieu of anyone to confide in, Lily had shed the events of that summer like a snake shedding its skin, refashioning herself into someone new, someone good, someone other people aspired to be. It was an impression of her life she had clung to as tightly as if it were a raft in the middle of an ocean. But the fear had always been there, sitting on her shoulder like a vexatious golem: the fear that at any moment the truth might be discovered. Countless times over the years she had imagined her mum confessing, imagined the police interviews, the trial, the prison sentence. So many times she had tried to imagine what she would say if questioned, whether she would confess to her part in it, whether she would acknowledge that she had sown the seed in her mum’s mind. But this was one part of the scenario where her imagination always failed her.
‘I couldn’t. I knew that if I told anyone, I’d be putting Mum at risk. I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t do it to any of us.’ Lily felt a fissure opening up in her voice.
‘So you’ve been trying to protect Mum all this time? That’s why you didn’t say anything? You just wanted to protect her?’
Lily was about to nod but a series of memories crept into her head: Zoe and Jess sitting cross-legged on the bottom bunk, painting each other’s fingernails, brushing each other’s hair, whispering into each other’s ears. Zoe and Jess glancing at one another across the dinner table, silent communications indecipherable to all but the two of them. The way her sisters had finished each other’s sentences, how they had laughed at the same jokes and cried at the same books, how they had always known that the other was in distress long before it had been voiced.
As she glanced across the table to where Jess was awaiting an answer, Lily glimpsed a shadow of the ten-year-old girl who had sat on the edge of the sofa, encased in their mum’s arms, face contorting with grief as she was told of Zoe’s death. She heard the sound of Jess sobbing into her pillow every night after Zoe had died. She remembered coming down to breakfast each morning to the stippling of skin around Jess’s eyes, recalled the months that Jess’s face had seemed permanently mottled with grief. Lily had known what it was to lose a sister and she had always understood it was a bereavement from which she would never recover. But she had not lost a twin. And the incomprehensibility of Jess’s grief made Lily shake her head. ‘Not just Mum. You, too. Because if you’d known the truth about Zoe’s death, you’d have had to live with it. And you two were so close, I just couldn’t imagine how you’d be able to do that.’
Lily paused and it seemed to her that this was one of those moments when words were as delicate as eggshells and only the lightest tread ensured they wouldn’t get broken. ‘But isn’t that what you’ve been doing too, Jess? Isn’t that why you never told Mum what you suspected me of doing? Because you knew it would devastate her. Weren’t you just trying to protect her too?’
Chapter 65
Jess
Jess thought about all those times her belief in Lily’s crime had strained at the leash, urging her towards disclosure. All the times she had dared imagine the relief at unburdening herself. But each time she had been silenced by the same single image: that of her mum’s face crumpling with renewed grief. ‘Of course it was. I couldn’t have done that to her.’
Jess blinked and there it was: the image of Lily standing outside the door to the spare bedroom, arm twisted behind her, Jess so certain of the guilt on Lily’s face. As she replayed the scene, watching it afresh, knowing what she now knew, she could see her misreading so clearly: how she had mistaken distress for anger, fear for panic, grief for guilt. And the effect of that replay – watching, frame by frame, the shift in perspective, the change in meaning – was disorienting, bewildering. For the first time Jess recognised the grave simplicity of her error of judgement: one emotion exchanged for another, a story invented to ward off a trauma she was not ready to face. All these years she had supplanted anger for mourning, had punished one sister for still being alive out of grief for the one who was not.