Robin takes a deep breath and looks at Sarah, while Rez stares at the paper in his hands.
“He says it wasn’t my fault,” Rez says, “but you…He says it was his idea to steal the stuff, but that’s not true. The minute he mentioned his mum’s jewelry I started to think a certain way. We were always broke and it was just sitting there. I dunno who finally said it but it was not solely his idea.”
Rez is wiping his eyes with his right hand, holding the note away with his left.
“He says he pushed Sarah,” Rez reads, looking up in confusion. “But he didn’t. No one did. She fell. You fell, didn’t you?” he says to Sarah.
“I still don’t know,” Sarah says, quietly and emphatically.
“Poor Cal,” Rez says. “And you’ve had this the whole time?”
Robin hangs her head. “Yeah,” she says. “Maybe you should have it now. I’m sorry, for that part at least. I only wanted to do right by him.”
“You might not believe this, Robin, but that’s all I wanted to do too.”
—
He left, cradling the note like a newborn. It was a strangely flat feeling after weeks of anticipation and fear, years of mutual loathing.
Robin knew she’d been blinkered, knew she’d laid everything at Rez’s feet. Knew it wasn’t fair, but it had felt fair. She hadn’t known her dad did the same.
And she believed Rez. Believed he wouldn’t come back. Believed the anger and grief he’d carried around had boiled over in his frenzies at the door, even to scaling her roof to peer at her world. It wasn’t okay, it wasn’t normal, but who was she to judge normal reactions?
As the front door clicked back into its frame, the two sisters hugged wordlessly. Too many words had come out already that they didn’t have the energy to pick up and tidy away. So they didn’t.
FORTY
SARAH|1998
Nobody else has ever seen that letter. Just Robin. She won’t let me read it, has just given me a patchy summary that I don’t believe. And no one else knows it exists. Not Hilary, not Dad and not the police. Robin carries it with her, clutching it to her in bed as she cries silently every night. I watch her through a crack in the door and creep away, my own grief stealing my tongue.
Robin plans to speak at the inquest, whenever it is arranged. She plans to tell the panel of strangers that her stepbrother had been led astray by Rez, his resistance low because of the brutality and rejection from his father, Drew Granger.
Drew and Mum came around the day after Callum ended his life. They sat on the edge of the sofa in silence, across from a half-conscious Hilary, who had been given something, and Dad, who was silent, still shivering in shock.
Nobody knew what to say and everyone felt responsible. Only some of them should have, but that’s not the way it works.
Robin had refused to come out of her room to see them, and Mum sent Drew to the car while she went up to speak to my sister. I expected her to reappear seconds later, but Mum was gone a little while. Perhaps Robin was desperate for comfort, while Mum still didn’t know that I’d loved and lost, that I needed comfort and couldn’t possibly seek it from her. She must have known what happened that night in Atlanta, and she just left me to hide it and deal with it all by myself. If she’d known the outcome, the loss, she’d probably just be relieved. The surface would still look the same. And isn’t that what matters?
ROBIN|1998
They all nursed their grief in different ways. Hilary had emerged from the sedation she’d been given and trailed like a ghost around the house. She would go into the garage and sit amongst the spiders and the dust, leaning against the bin bags full of stuff Callum had left behind. Unable to open or touch inside the sacks.
She spent hours in the garden. Dug holes in it for no reason, filled them up again. Jack just watched from the window, made her cups of tea that went cold as she drove her shovel deeper into the lawn, scarf slipping from her hair.
Everything Callum had ever touched became an artifact. A crisp old toothbrush was wrapped in tissue paper to preserve it. There was a bag of laundry he’d never picked up, cleaned of his scent by the machine. Hilary would hug the clothes and take deep sniffs, throwing them across the room because they smelled of detergent and nothing more, then gather them all up, mumbling apologies into them.
Robin hid. She hid in silence, because there was so much music that was out of bounds now and she hadn’t yet found anything untainted. Callum oozed out of her record collection whichever way she thought about it. Bands he’d got her into, music they’d loved together, albums they’d quarreled about, those early chords they’d learned. It was too knotty to try to unpick, and every note would strike her heart, so she didn’t risk it. She lay on her bed, staring out of the window and watching the clouds tumble slowly like playful animals. Watching the scratches left in the blue by planes heading to and from Heathrow.
When Robin slept, she dreamed of Callum. Dreams in hyper-real colors, rich textures, smells. Dreams so real they taunted her into trying to stay awake. She lay at night with her arm slung over the acoustic Eastman guitar he’d left. The only physical reminder she could bear to see.
She knew her mother and Drew would come over. That in grief, Drew would claim an ownership of Callum that he’d surrendered in real life. She wanted to lock the house down to keep him out. Instead, she just continued to hide.
When her mother knocked lightly on her door—“Robin, it’s Mum”—Robin fully expected to tell her to go away. “Can I come in?”
“Okay,” Robin said, choking on the word in surprise.
Angela had come in and sat lightly on the bed. Robin didn’t look at her. She stayed where she sat, leaning against the wall with her fingertips just reaching to brush the strings of the guitar.
“I’m so sorry, love,” her mother said, and Robin’s face creased in on itself and the tears came so suddenly that her face and hands and arms were soaked with the wet heat of them.
The eruption passed quickly. Robin wiped her nose and eyes on her sleeve and looked up. Her eyes burned and felt swollen.
“I don’t know what to do, Mum,” she said. And then the hot tears came in waves again, her small chest lurching with the force of them. When she looked up, she saw the tears coursing down her mother’s face, and her own tears turned to anger.
“It’s his fault, you know. All of it.”
“Whose fault?” her mother asked.
“You know who. Your husband. I heard him downstairs just now, heard his empty words in the hall. How dare he come here and act like he’s upset.”
“Of course he’s upset! We both are, we all are. God, Robin, how could you say that?”
“He hated Callum.”
“He did n—”