“Nope.” We haven’t spoken since that night on my front doorstep last month, when he confessed to having sex with my sister. He’s tried—turning up at the house and my office, messaging, voice notes, calling, even writing me a letter. But whenever I think of him, my imagination pairs him up with Tash all over again.My sister.The person who’s supposed to love me most in the world. I’ve tortured myself wondering whether the sex was good, memorable, mind-blowing; I’ve tried to work out how many times I’ve slept with him since he did the same with her; I’ve gone over and over the impact the whole thing has had on my life over the past ten years, without me even knowing it.
Anyway, he’s backed off this past week, since Reuben threatened to report him for harassment.
—
It ended like this.
I’d bumped into Max’s friend Rob in the little campus supermarket on that warm September Friday. He dropped into our brief conversation—casual as you like—that Max wanted to live with him and Dean the following summer, when they all moved to London forthe LPC. I felt the shock of this claim like a slap—only the previous night, Max and I had been checking out flats of our own, making plans for our big move to the city in nine months’ time.
I confronted Max that afternoon, under a vast cedar tree outside the law school. He was already edgy and tense, thanks to a ton of coursework he’d just been given on intellectual property law, and the logistics of arranging another internship at HWW for the Christmas break. He refused to ring Rob—as I wanted him to, right then—to tell him unequivocally he’d be moving in with me next summer.
Convinced he was being untruthful, I walked away, told him over my shoulder I was canceling Tash, who’d been due to come and visit us in Norwich that evening. She was planning to drive up after work, and we were going to spend the weekend together.
I messaged her not to come, then stayed out late with friends, not wanting to return to the flat I shared with Max. The future I’d been so certain of seemed suddenly to be under threat—but was it my fault? Had I overreacted, behaved unreasonably? Was Rob simply getting ahead of himself, misunderstanding the conversations he’d had with Max?
By the time I got back to the flat in the early hours, I’d convinced myself I was in the wrong. Max was just too popular—hardly his fault. Of course his friends would want him to move in with them next year. That didn’t mean he would. I planned to crawl into our bed, cover him with kisses, whisper my apologies, and make it up to him the best way I knew how.
But it seemed the damage was already irreversible. Max pushed me away that night, turned his back, wouldn’t speak to me. And for the whole of the next week or so, he was distant, closed off. He refused to discuss our fight, wouldn’t mention the future, flinched from the subject like it burned. And then, on the following Friday, he ended it. I don’t remember much about that conversation, I felt so dazed withdisbelief. But I do recall hearing him say perhaps he would move in with Dean and Rob next summer after all.
It was like handing him my heart, then watching him snap it in two.
—
I never got your message that night,” Tash says pleadingly now, her blue eyes wide, like a baby’s. Her voice is thick and clammy. “I drove up to Norwich like we’d arranged, and turned up at your flat, but you were out. Max said you’d had a fight.”
I shake my head. Despite the full month I’ve had to process all this, I’m still not sure I can bear to hear the details of what happened next, between my sister and the love of my life.
“We got drunk,” she says. “Like, crazy drunk. He had a bottle of gin.”
“You don’t even like gin,” I say, stupidly.
Briefly, she shuts her eyes. “No, because that night put me off it for life.”
A memory drifts back to me—seeing an empty gin bottle in the bin the next morning, partially hidden beneath a pile of eggshells. It struck me as odd—firstly, because Max had bought it only a few days earlier. But also because sinking so much gin seemed strange when I knew he’d had a long run planned for that morning, ten miles with a friend.
Tash is gabbling now. “I’d been having a horrible few weeks at work, and... I guess Max wasn’t having a great time, either. You’d had this fight, and he was worried about his exams, and his friends—”
“This isn’t seriously going to be your defense—that you were bothstressed?” My voice feels hollow and flimsy, like I’m seconds from being sick.
Through the open window drifts the urgent scream of brakes on the street outside, followed by the sharp blast of a horn, doors slamming, swearing.
Tash’s forehead crimps into a frown. “I want you to know, Lucy, it was hardly even... The whole thing lasted less than five minutes.”
Unbearable images begin to ricochet through my head. Kissing. Clothes coming off. Hands, body parts, noises, breathlessness. “Who came on to who?”
“He was reaching over to take my glass, and... I thought he was going to kiss me.”
“Whywould you think that?”
“Like I said. We were drunk.”
As I look at her, it suddenly strikes me, the worst part about all this. It’s not—hard as it might be to believe—the physical act of them being together, although that, of course, is horrible. The worst part is finding out that my sister is a complete stranger. That the person I thought she was—honest, kind, principled—doesn’t actually exist. That she never did. That every single interaction I’ve had with her since that day has been a lie. Yes—there was a period after I returned from Australia when I pushed everyone away, including her. But in the years since Dylan was born, we’d been closer than ever, and I can honestly say rebuilding our relationship was one of the things that made me most proud.
“I quit uni because Max finished with me, and I was too much of a mess to carry on. I went traveling and...” I catch my breath, push away the specter of Nate. “And then I went for the first job I could get because I didn’t have a degree. I could never understand why Max had finished it. It just... didn’t make sense. He was the best thing in my life, and we missed out on...so much, after we broke up. And you watched all that happening, when the whole time, it was your fault. You let melive with you...” Hot tears are tumbling down my face now, wetting my lips as I speak. “You’ve had nearly ten years to tell me the truth. You’ve watched me grieving what we had, everything I lost...”
She’s crying again too, now. “I know. I’m so sorry. I should have told you straightaway, but the longer I left it...”
I find myself distracted for a moment by her earrings, a pair of ostentatious drop pearls that Simon gave her for their third wedding anniversary. Posh to the point of pompous, hardly befitting a woman who’s shagged her sister’s boyfriend. “Does Simon know?”
