‘Amelia?’ I called out, straining my ears in the hope that I’d hear the drum of water from the shower, but her reply came, as I somehow had known it would, from my own bedroom.
My legs felt leaden as I crossed the hall. She was exactly where I feared I would find her, kneeling on the floor beside my bed. Surrounding her, fanned out on the wooden boards, was a sea of glossy photographs from the memory box.
Her head turned very, very slowly to face me. ‘What the fuck are these?’
‘I can explain,’ I said hurriedly, which was an outright lie, as I had absolutely no idea how to do that.
She had no interest in hearing my explanations. She led with an anger that I suspected had been brewing for several hours.
‘You lied.’ Her voice didn’t even sound like my sister’s. ‘You lied to me. I asked you if your friend had been able to get the photographs off my phone and you stood there, right in front of me, and lied your head off, telling me he hadn’t been able to retrieve them.’
‘I… I…’ I had nothing. I wasn’t prepared for this argument. But Amelia certainly was.
‘Every last treasured memory I have of Sam was on that phone. Youknewhow important those photographs were to me and you bloody lied about having them. And then you printed them off and hid them from me. What the fuck is wrong with you?’
I shook my head, every inch of my body scorched by the flaying I was getting. The flaying I deserved.
‘But worse than hiding these from me,’ Amelia said, placing a trembling arm on the bed to help her stand, ‘worse than the way you deceived me, was the way you made me doubt everything I knew to be true. You made me think I was going crazy. I searched every inch of this cottage for signs of Sam, but I couldn’t find any. And now I know why.’
Because he isn’t real, I desperately wanted to say, but she wasn’t allowing me to speak yet.
‘You’ve hidden every last trace of him away from me, haven’t you? Just like you hid these photographs. But what I can’t for the life of me work out is why. Why, Lexi?’ she asked, her whole body trembling with emotion. ‘Why would you do this to your own sister? Your flesh and blood. Your twin.’
‘Please, Mimi, let’s just calm down and think about all of this rationally.’ I looked around the room desperately. ‘Where’s Mum? She’ll back me up on this.’
‘She’s at Tom’s,’ Amelia snapped. ‘And leave her out of it. This is just between you and me.’
‘Okay,’ I said, holding up my hands as though surrendering. ‘But please, don’t think I did anything here to hurt you.’ My voice wobbled as tears began to course down my cheeks. ‘All I wanted was to make you well again.’
Amelia’s eyes were glittering, but it was rage that had put the sparkle in them, not tears. ‘You wanted to be the only one who could make me better,’ she said, her voice that of a stranger.
I shook my head. ‘What? No. What do you mean?’
She looked down at the photographs scattered at our feet. ‘You can see what Sam and I feel for each other. It’s there in every single bloody photograph from my phone. And you couldn’t stand that, could you?’
‘What?’ She was so far off beam I had no idea how to pull the conversation back into the realms of sanity. ‘I’m not jealous of you and your relationship with Sam,’ I denied, overriding the voice in my head that insistently reminded me he didn’t exist.
‘Well, I think that’s exactly what you are. You’re jealous of having someone be as close or closer to me than you are. And you’re jealous of having someone who looks at you the way Sam looks at me in these photographs.’
I couldn’t help glancing down and catching a snapshot of Nick and I smiling at each other on the beach. My tears began to fall even faster.
‘You’ve probably been envious ever since I met him. He was always more your type than mine.’ She made a good point. Nick was exactly the type of man I’d always been attracted to.
‘Maybe you couldn’t stand it that I’d made a relationship succeed in the way you never have.’
Her abrupt change of direction left my head spinning.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘The way every relationship you’ve ever had has come with a built-in self-destruct button. You’ve not been unlucky in love, the way you like to believe.’ I shook my head at the venom I’d never once heard before, spewing out of this stranger who looked like my sister, but clearly wasn’t.
‘You’ve deliberately made sure you don’t find love by picking the wrong men over and over again. You’ve self-sabotaged your life ever since Dad died.’
If she’d taken out a dagger and sliced it straight into my heart, she couldn’t have hurt me more. She was the only one who knew the guilt I still carried deep inside me for what had happened on the day our father died, and hearing her use it as a weapon just about destroyed me.
‘And now you don’t want anyone to love me, or care for me either, except you. You’ve done nothing since you’ve got here but keep Sam away from me.’
I was shaking my head, helpless to know how to convince her that she was a million miles from the truth.
