I grinned through the haze of sugar and cheap booze. ‘Well, that can’t be true. Not if this wine and the ice cream are anything to go by.’
‘I’d half-expected your emergency message to be nothing more than a brilliant and tactical excuse to get me out of bed,’ Anna muttered, stepping around to my other side and dropping on to the floor beside me.
But this wasn’t an act. ‘It’s over,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s all over.’
Laura’s face dropped. ‘You haven’t – fuck, please tell me you haven’t done anything –’
‘No! No, I don’t mean – my job. It’s over,’ I said with a helpless shrug.
Anna stared as though she hadn’t heard me. ‘No.’
‘Yup.’
‘No –’
‘If you’re just going to sit on the floor and disagree with me,’ I said darkly, lifting the bottle of wine for another swig, ‘then fuck off.’
My sister’s glare was severe. ‘If you’re not going to tell me what’s happened, I’ll just leave.’ She waited. ‘Jessy?’
I just sat there. How had my whole world fallen apart in a matter of days?
‘I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s wrong!’ Anna said sharply, eyeing me with that lawyer look of hers.
And yeah, I was well aware of the accuracy of the statement, considering that I had told Laura and Anna practically nothing about why Patrick and I … about why he and I weren’t …
They didn’t need to know.
Just that it was over.
‘And it really is over with Patrick,’ I said quietly, still not sure which hurt more – the loss of the man I really cared about, or the implosion of the only proper job I’d ever had. ‘It’s over,’ I mumbled, lifting the bottle.
‘Over – with Patrick?’ I’d never seen Laura look so outraged. ‘Like, actually over? I thought all that break-up stuff was Derek wanting bigger headlines –’
‘Yeah, he accused me of lying and messing with his … his private life.’
‘Just because your mum is dead, that doesn’t mean you can fix mine!’
Those were words that my sister absolutely did not need to hear.
Anna swore under her breath. ‘I’m going to kill him. I warned him, I’m going to kill –’
‘First things first,’ Laura muttered, jerking her head towards me.
Me? What did I do?
Delicately, making sure she didn’t spill a drop – not in this economy – Anna pulled the bottle of wine from my mostly unresisting hands. ‘There we go.’
‘Oh, come on –’
‘Not at ten in the morning, thank you,’ Laura said severely, though with a wry smile. ‘All this time, and I’m still looking after you.’
I’m not saying I was always the one to fall apart, because I wasn’t. We were tough, Laura and I. We’d had to be.
But she was my older sister, even if only by minutes, and sometimes I was perfectly happy letting her take care of me. She always knew what to do, always resisted the urge to despair – an urge I embraced whenever I could, especially if it meant I could justify having pizza in bed.
‘I guess I should be glad you’re not dating him any more,’ Laura said lightly, slowly lowering herself so that she was sitting on the floor with us. ‘He gave this big interview. In preparation for the awards thingy this Saturday.’
A shiver of tension rippled down my spine. ‘An interview.’
