‘I don’t think I can do that,’ Joy said hurriedly. ‘Testify.’
‘Nobody says you have to. Not if you can’t bear it. You never have to see him again. You don’t even have to think about him. It’s over.’
Now Joy felt the heave in her chest as a sob made its way out. Again she refused to give in.It’s over, she told herself. She turned to smile through eyes shining with tears at Patti, wanting to reassure her she wasn’t broken.
‘You must have been so afraid,’ said Patti. ‘And we were all just… useless.’
‘You were a kid, Patti.’
‘I was twenty-two, well old enough to come storming through your flat door and kick him in the balls! But I didn’t do anything.’
‘You did. You were the one running intel on Mum, keeping me in the loop.’
‘Yeah, telling you how pissed off she was. Hardly helping, was it?’
‘I needed to know, and you were great at texting me, checking in.’
‘Until I stopped.’ Patti’s eyes were deep round pools of sorrow now. She looked just like Radia and the sight made Joy’s heart swell.
‘You were the one who started texting again when Rads was tiny. You reached out. Anyway, you had no idea what was going on with Sean. Nobody did. I pushed you away.’
‘Hetoldyou to push us.’
‘Well, yeah, subtly, he did. But I agreed to it all, didn’t I?’
‘You didn’twantto though.’
‘You don’t understand. At the time, I thought I did. He’d say you were all busybodies and you were trying to poison me against him, and some days it really did look like that.’
‘I get it now. I didn’t understand at the time, not really. I just thought you’d taken up with a shitbag bloke. I didn’t think it was like, literally pathological. That he was…’ Patti stopped herself.
Joy faced her sister and finished the sentence for her. ‘Abusive?’
Patti looked down at her abandoned food. ‘Did he hurt you?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘No.Never.’ Joy put a hand to her sister’s arm. ‘I thought maybe he might, but he never did. He shouted, a lot, right in my face, threatened me sometimes, but…’ Her voice trailed off. She didn’t want to say, ‘but that was all it was’. Because that had been bad enough, she realised. The shouting, the gaslighting, the million micro-aggressions that had left her head spinning, not knowing who she was anymore. Ithadbeen abuse, even when he’d never hit her.
Joy squeezed Patti’s arm. This was more than Joy had ever confessed and it felt like a buried chest of secrets being unlocked within her.
‘He really is gone,’ Joy said, as much for her own sake as for Patti’s. ‘And he really doesn’t know where we are. And he doesn’t want us at all. He’s probably got loads of daughters and sons all over south-west London. And all those women? He doesn’t want any of us. It really is actually over.’
Patti was on her knees in an instant and putting her arms around her sister. Joy wrapped her up in a hug that swiped the breath from both of them.
Patti spoke into Joy’s hair. ‘Are we going to be all right, Joy? You and me?’
‘’Course we are,’ Joy said, putting her down again with a tearful sniff, but she was smiling too.
‘Joyce and Patience,’ said Patti, barely a whisper.
‘Team Foley,’ replied Joy.
They smiled at each other in silence for a beat in which the sisters’ entire worlds became righted again, having been spinning wildly out of their orbits for five whole years.
‘Can I see Tiny now, before you guys have to leave?’ Patti asked tentatively. ‘Where is this childminder anyway?’
‘Oh my god, Jowan!’ Joy cried. ‘He’s got a wedding to help with. Minty’s going to be mad as hell!’
The pair stumbled up onto their feet, brushing away crumbs and sand.
