Wading through them all, there were plenty of photos of all four sisters as children, no giant gaps where a person could say ‘why were there no photos of me when I was four or six?’ Rory had been photographed just as much as three-year-old Indy had been. She had begun to feel guilty over the feeling that her childhood had been different to theirs.
‘People see things differently,’ Chantal had said wisely as she’d looked over her partner’s shoulder at the mass of photos on the table top
And then, Rory had spotted her.
Lori. Their one-time nanny, beloved friend with the attic rooms where the four girls used to hang out.
The scene was a random party and there were many people in the shot: it was a slightly blurred one, with somebody toasting something in the middle and a birthday cake. It was hard to date the photo but there was no mistaking Lori, standing in the distance with one single hand cradled around her belly. Rory, who had never been pregnant but who recognised that classic stance, had known. She’d remembered the long-ago conversation with Indy when she’d seen Dad kissing Lori.
Rory, with her head in a notebook, saw everything – it was like her inbuilt radar was tuned to a higher frequency than other people. She saw her father that day. With Lori. And she’d raced to Indy to tell her.
‘Indy, I saw Daddy kissing Lori! Why was he kissing her? Why? ’
Instead of hugging her close, Indy – her surrogate mother-figure - had been furious. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a silly little girl. Dad was just – hugging Lori, because she was sad and don’t tell lies about it—’
‘No, I didn’t lie,’ cried Rory, stung.
‘You did and you’re not to go around repeating it or you’ll get into trouble with me and Dad and Lori. Lies are bad,’ said Indy.
But surely Dad kissing Lori was worse?
The incident had created a slight fracture in her relationship with Indy. Rory hadn’t had the words to explain how she felt.
On the surface, she’d calmly ignored her eldest sister the same way she ignored the jocks in school who were beginning to realise she was different from the other girls, the ones they teased and half-fancied. Inside, she’d ached.
Even then, Rory had known how to hide hurt with an angry face.
She’d put it in the back of her mind, the way childhood things receded into distant memory, until now.
Looking at the photograph of Lori, a woman in her late twenties, then, in the pose of the newly pregnant. Rory suddenly gauged it had been taken some years after she’d seen her father kissing Lori.
Was that when it had all really fallen apart? When another Robicheaux sister had come into the world?
Rory didn’t allow herself to process any of this – she simply wanted proof. If she had another sister, she was going to find her and to hell with the consequences.
It was easy enough to turn private detective. In the days of the Internet with Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, it was no trouble at all to find people by finding other people who might know them. It was a circuitous, snaking route but that’s how Rory had found Chloe.
‘I’m trying to contact a Lori Riordain, who worked for a family in Killiney,’ Rory had written in an Instagram message and, to her astonishment, Chloe had accepted the message request and responded..
‘Maybe we should meet up. I know who you’re talking about,’ said Chloe, not giving anything away.
Intrigued and against Chantal’s advice because who knew who this Chloe girl was, Rory had driven to the city centre flat where Chloe lived.
Young, vibrant, quirky, when she opened the door, Rory had inhaled quickly: Chloe looked exactly like Savannah and Eden, if only they had jet-black hair, the same shade as Lori’s had been.
‘Hello,’ she’d said, standing at the street door of her flat with a cup in her hand, dark hair tied up, wearing a paint-splattered apron over jeans. And a necklace, the same necklace Rory and her sisters wore, each with a different semi-precious stone.
Chloe’s was the blue of lapis lazuli.
‘You’re my sister,’ said Rory, staring at this girl. Chloe. Her sister, well – half-sister. But that didn’t matter. This girl had been kept from them all. She started to cry and she never cried. Chloe patted her on the back in a friendly manner.
‘Come on in. It’ll be fine,’ which was exactly what Lori used to say to them during their teenage disasters.
‘I wondered if any of you would ever come looking for me,’ said Chloe, moving aside to let Rory into the house. ‘I’m on the top floor. No lifts in these old houses.’
She was nineteen, she said. An art student from Cork and currently paid the rent on her small flat by selling seascapes with mystical sea creatures in them.
As she led the way up the stairs, she said, ‘I wasn’t going to come to see any of you. I have a life and if none of you ever contacted me, then that was the way it was meant to be. I believe that destiny lets people drift in and out of our lives in a very random way. What happens is the universe letting people in and out.’
