My sister died five years ago and you have not mentioned her death to me.
In the five years since Leonie died you have asked me for money eleven times.
I’m not going to give you any money.
If you’d like to attempt a father/ son rather than investee/ investor relationship, I’d be happy to talk.
Otherwise, we should probably call it quits.
Best,
James
He pressed Send. Good.
The next one was going to be harder to write. It meant more.
To: Ella Marshall
From: James Grey
Subject: Hi
Hey Sis,
I just wanted to say that I’m sorry I haven’t been around much recently. Would you and the kids like to come to London for a weekend sometime soon?
James x
He pressed Send. Wow.
The email to his father would likely only result in a possible reduction in requests for money. The one to Ella might be the first step in re-building a proper relationship with his older sister.
* * *
‘Hi, Cass.’
‘Fred chat time?’
‘Yep.’ It was the third day running. Fred had been moping like nobody’s business. Understandable. James missed Cassie too and he barely knew her, nor had she been feeding him treats every day most of his life. ‘Question. How long have you had the alpacas and how old are they?’
‘Donna’s four, Maisie three and Fred two. I got them as babies and fed them initially from a bottle.’
James could imagine her doing that. She’d have a similar expression of concentration to the one she’d had when he’d seen her chatting to them.
‘How’s your day been?’ he asked when she’d finished giving Fred his pep talk for the afternoon.
She told him about a visit to the London Dungeon – she’d wanted to check whether her characters could feasibly get trapped in there overnight – and then asked him how his own day had been.
He hesitated for a moment and then suddenly decided to take the plunge. Confide in her a little. ‘Following on from our conversation the other day, I wrote a couple of big emails to family members on Sunday. I haven’t been properly in touch with my sister for a while and I invited her to come and stay when I get back to London. I heard back from her today and we’ve set a date.’
‘Wow, that’s great. What… happened? If you want to say?’
‘Nothing serious. You know, just life. We just drifted apart.’ Turned out that there was only so much soul-baring he could manage in one conversation.
Cassie waited for a second, maybe to see if he had more to say, and then said, ‘I’m going to address my other big thing. I’m going to go to Glasgow for the weekend. I left soon after I had the miscarriage, and I haven’t been able to face going back because of the memories. It’s been four years. I’m going to go just before we swap back.’
‘Wow. Congratulations on taking that step. That’s huge.’ He’d had no idea that she had any of that going on in her head. Funny how they knew so much about how the other lived and a fair amount about their current lives but so little about their backgrounds. Well, not that unusual when it came to him. He generally didn’t tell people stuff.
