“What you always do. Ruin everything. Take everything.” Hervoice was shrill and cracked as she singsonged her mockery at him. “Joseph needs to talk, go outside and wait. Joseph needs some paperwork, I can see you afterward. Joseph loves the bear, give Joseph the bear, Daisy.”
The blue bear, charred and blinded by fire, popped into Joe’s head. He still didn’t remember it, but the thought of it made his stomach knot with sick tension and made pressurefill his head.
“If you loved it so much, why did you burn it?” he asked. Blood oozed between his fingers. It soaked his sleeve and had soaked the carpet under his feet. “If it was yours.”
Rosie reached up and thumped the heel of her hand against her temple in exasperation.
“It wasn’t mine, it was yours. Everything I wanted, you got. Everything I loved, you took away. It was my life. I neverwanted you to come in and ruin it.Inever wanted you.Inever wanted to go and live with Harry. I wanted to stay with my dad, but no one listened to what I wanted, did they? Everything was about you, about what you needed. If you’d never been born, Joseph, my life would have been perfect. It would have been happy.”
Joe wasn’t in charge of his legs anymore. He tried to lock his knees, to stayon his feet, but he didn’t get a say. His knees folded, and he slid gracelessly down the wall.
“You’re my sister,” he said.
She flinched away from that, or maybe it was the puddle of blood she stepped back to avoid.
“Half sister,” she said defensively. “And that doesn’t count. Everyone knows that. That’s why Dad got me andHarrytook you away. You should have stayed away. Everything was fine.”
With a hollow thump, Joe leaned his head back against the painted wood. He swallowed and worked his tongue around his dry mouth.
“Youemailedme,” he reminded her.
She rubbed her eye with the back of her hand. The knife caught strands of her red hair and clipped them short.
“I was angry,” she said. “Dad had died, and I hadn’t seen you in so long and then I saw your name on Twitter, yourphoto. You looked happy—in love. Like you still got to have everything, and I got nothing. It reminded me of everything that happened. I’d wanted to forget about it. I needed to forget some of it, but how could I when you kept lying.”
Joe’s ears had started to ring. He worked his jaw from one side to the other to try and relieve the pressure. His ears popped, but he could still hear the bells. It wasonly when Rosie crouched down next to him and reached into his pocket that he knew what it was.
“Cal.” She turned the phone and showed it to him. “He’s worried about you.”
Joe laughed bitterly and raised his arm. “He has a point.”
Something soft passed over Rosie’s face. It thumbed away the tension lines around her eyes and softened the brackets around her lips.
“Bea worries about me,” shesaid. “I only wanted to delay you that day in the pub, so the courier could get there. Maybe I’d met her before, but I didn’t remember it. I really like her.”
“I like Cal,” Joe said. He peeled his dry lips off his teeth and tried for a smile. “They’re both going to worry today.”
It was a joke. Not a very good one. Rosie sighed.
“I know,” she said. “But… I realized something today, when youcalled. You’re my Moby Dick.”
Joe laughed raggedly. “That’s what he said.”
She gave him that prim look again. “Don’t be crude. You’re never going to go away. Neither of us will ever, ever be really happy.”
“I was happy,” Joe said.
“No,” Rosie said. “And neither will they be. Bea and Cal. We aren’t meant to be here, you and me. That’s why it always goes wrong. That’s what I wanted to explain,until you made me….”
She gestured at Joe’s filleted hand and pursed her lips in distaste.
“If you wanted me to go back to California, all you had to do was wait,” Joe rasped out. The phone rang again, a persistent chime from Cal, and Joe supposed that he might be lying… or not. He didn’t know if he’d have stayed a while longer for Cal, and—more importantly—neither did Rosie. “My tickets arebooked, and you’d have never heard from me again.”
Rosie put the knife down on the sideboard and walked over to drag Joe back up onto his feet. She squirmed under his arm and grabbed the back of his jeans with one hand.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” she said calmly. Once he was up, she grabbed the knife again. “You’ve already spoiled everything. All Abigail could talk about last nightwas you—how handsome you looked, how she wished she’d have been able to let herself be your mother. I spent years with her, Joseph. I was the daughter she never had, and now she doesn’t care about me anymore. And when Bea finds out, when she realizes I lied to her…. No. Children should have a mother, Joseph. We grew up wrong without her—selfish and broken. I think maybe you were right, that we needto find her.”
Joe leaned on her shoulder as she walked him down the hall and into the kitchen. The table was set for two, but there was a layer of dust on the cutlery. The fridge hummed and rattled, but from the dead cartons of takeout stacked by the fridge, it wasn’t used much. It didn’t feel like a memorial, more like a squat—someplace you came and stayed but tried to leave no trace.
