The One to Blame

by S.E. Lynes

Genres: Literary Fiction; Domestic Thrillers

Synopsis

Why pretend your life is a dream when you’re living a nightmare?

When Annie met Dom, he seemed like everything she was waiting for: charming, loving, generous. When they got married, and he showed her the studio he’d built in the garden for her to paint in, she knew that at last she had found a way to be free.

She didn’t notice the trap until it had closed around her. And now, as she does his shopping and cooks his food and sits waiting for him well into the night, she has to smile through her tears, hide her anger, and tell no one the truth, not even her sister Isla.

Isla thought Annie was happy. They have always been as close as sisters can be, they knew everything about each other. And then the call comes in the middle of the night. Annie and Dom are dead.

When Isla arrives at her sister’s house, the smell of smoke still hangs on the air, and soon she realises she didn’t know Annie at all.

Because Annie was living a lie.

And as Isla sifts through the ashes, she must decide whether she wants to know the truth, or to protect what’s left of her family…

A brilliantly twisty tale of family secrets and the darkness that can lie behind closed doors, The One to Blame will keep you turning the pages till the final devastating revelation. Fans of Lisa Jewell, Gillian Flynn and Louise Candlish will love it.

See what everyone’s saying about S.E. Lynes:

‘Just WOW! Totally unputdownable.’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘I am shocked, dumbstruck, gobsmacked, speechless and trying desperately to find the right words to give this book the justice it deserves… Wow! I loved it!’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘My stomach is in knots!’ Motherhood for Slackers, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘You know when you pick up a book and can't put it down because it has you gripped, and you read in bed until your eyes are closing and the book keeps falling from your grasp. Then you wake up at 3.30 a.m. and think I can't sleep because I am thinking about that book so I might as well finish it? Well this is one of those books!’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Fantastic!!… Keeps you well and truly perched on the edge of your seat… Brought chills down my spine… So mesmerising!’ Stardust Book Reviews, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Talk about an emotional gut punch!… it tore me apart and laid me out to dry… Pure genius! You need a section for infinity stars as five just doesn't cut it!’ Chapter in My Life, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘I just could not put this book down… The tension ramps up and up until you feel like you might explode. I devoured the book as quickly as I could and was frustrated with myself for needing sleep… Extraordinary and brilliant’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Wow… Devoured in one sitting!!! Loved it…

Release date: July 13, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

In my hands is a black-and-white photograph of my sister and me as kids. I remember this picture being taken so vividly. We were in the back garden of our parents’ wee white house in our wee white town on the edge of Loch Fyne. Inveraray. West coast of Scotland. Our dresses are home-made, floral, real Sound of Music curtain jobs. My mother didn’t make them out of actual curtains, I don’t think. She probably made them from one of her old dresses, some sixties creation – she was always making new clothes from old, making repairs, making do. This will have been ’73, ’74. Annie was about eight, myself about three. I was still a younger sister then. I was still a sister.

I look out over her garden, cleared now of the black wreckage beyond the apple tree. The last time I saw my sister was here, almost two years ago now. The apples were still hard and small, the wasps still feisty, the days long and warm. I always loved coming to her cottage – the change of pace, the air, the sea. Four months have passed since I got that terrible call, and part of me still finds it impossible to believe I will never see her again. The fire, what came after the fire, the reality of my sister’s life, her death – the truth has fallen in slow rain. Even now, I know I have yet to turn my face to its last acid drops.

My eyes return, can’t help but return, to the photograph. It’s our chubby knees that make my eyes prick – legs locked with the effort of standing nicely for my dad’s Kodak Brownie. Photos were a rare thing, to be stuck into the album with tiny white adhesive corners that would yellow over time, lose their glue and fall off. Our entire family history contained in one battered cardboard book.

We will have had to brush our hair. Will have put on those dresses especially for this moment. Come out into the garden where it’s light. It was probably someone’s birthday.

‘Stand nicely,’ Dad will have said, arranging us in front of the best flower bed, heels sinking into the damp grass as he backed away. ‘That’s it.’ Raising the camera to his face, remembering his glasses, pushing them onto his head before pressing his eye to the viewfinder once again. ‘After three,’ he’ll have said. ‘And one, two, three… say cheese.’

‘Cheeeeeese.’

One shot. Don’t want to waste the film. We wouldn’t have thought for one second about what we looked like. Wouldn’t have seen the image for another year, maybe two, once the film was full and had been taken to Boots to be developed.

The dog-eared photo quivers in my hand. How short, how uneven, how adorable are the fringes of our practical bobs, chopped by my mother with the kitchen scissors. Saying cheese, holding hands, we are thrilled with ourselves. We are marvellous, we are smart. My sister’s knuckles are white – a tight grip. Five years older, she was proud, overprotective. She was also bonkers. I say it with love, but Lord, she was a case right enough.

Back then, Annie was the boss of me. If she’d told me to put my hand in the fire, I would have, no bother. It would be another eight years before our roles began to switch, before I became the elder, in a sense; not that I knew it was happening, not then. The change was slow, but I think now it began the night she crept down the creaking wooden steps of our bunk bed, shook me by the shoulder and whispered my name.

‘Isla.’

I blinked awake, startled at the white-nightdress ghost, calmed when I realised it was her: solid, alive, bent almost double. She was crying.

‘Annie?’ I whispered, nerves rising. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I think I’m pregnant.’

‘Pregnant? Like with a baby? How?’

‘I got carried away,’ she wept into her hands.

Carried away. In my mind bloomed the image of her netted inside a drawstring sack slung over the shoulder of a bony hunchbacked thief who looked exactly like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I didn’t say any of this of course. I was rising to the gravity of the occasion.

‘Who with?’ It was the most grown-up question I could think of.

She let out a quiet howl, like our dog when Mum played hymns on the piano. ‘His name was Malcolm.’

‘Malcolm what?’

‘I don’t know.’ She burst into fresh tears. ‘He was through from Glasgow. What am I going to do? I’m still at school.’

She was not quite sixteen. That means she was fifteen obviously. To protect ourselves, I suppose, we never said it like that, even years later. The shock of it is stronger now in retrospect, with hindsight’s understanding of the implications. Getting pregnant at that age in that place with those parents would define her whole life and, I can’t help but think – today of all days – her death. But I was ten and she was fifteen, both of us far too young to grasp all that, though the enormity of what she was telling me is something I am still able to feel bodily – that strange heat: part dread, part exhilaration.

‘It’ll be all right,’ I said, solemn as a judge. ‘I’ll help you.’

But neither of us knew what help meant. Even when I made my trip to the mobile library that week and scanned a book on reproduction hidden behind the pages of the world atlas – arms shaking with the effort of holding the weight of both because I could not take a book about sex home, could not even think about our parents finding it hidden in our shared room – still I could not figure out the information I needed to help her. I thought I’d heard something about hot baths, but I had no idea where or who from. Weeks later, desperate, Annie asked me to steal vodka from my best friend Rhona’s house (our parents didn’t keep alcohol at home). I did it. Shaking with the sin, I did it, for my big sister. I was the hero of the story, the angel, the avenger – me, Isla Andrews: hold my coat, I’m going in. Only I had to tell Rhona the secret because I needed her help. Together we emptied the vodka into a soup flask I’d brought from home. We had to top up the bottle with mineral water because the tap water in our town was a wee bit brown owing to it coming from the hills.

The next night, our parents asleep, I sat on the bathroom floor while my sister climbed weeping into a scalding bath, neat vodka in a mug with her name in pink calligraphy on the side –the words gracious and merciful beneath, which is what all lassies called Annie are supposed be, according to that mug.

She raised it to her lips but lowered it almost immediately.

‘I can’t,’ she wept. ‘I just can’t do it.’

She was so distraught, I had to help her up to her bunk and stroke her hair while she fell asleep. In the morning, she still didn’t feel well. I think she’d upset herself so badly she’d given herself a poorly tummy and a headache. With the solemnity I was still trying on like a cape, I told my parents she had a stomach bug. They were busy with a stocktake and didn’t pay much attention. They never fussed us when we were ill – a glass of water by the bedside, a day-long fast, a boiled egg and soldiers in the evening if you were up to it. Temperatures were taken with a hand against a forehead. To this day, I’ve never had an antibiotic.

And so the bump got bigger. Annie wore loose clothes – big sweatshirts, jeans unbuttoned at the waist. Rhona had crossed her heart and hoped to die, but she must’ve told just one other person, who promised to take it to their grave, and that one person told maybe two others in absolute confidence, who in turn swore they were tombs, absolute tombs, but who told maybe four more, but it didn’t come from them, all right? That’s how it is with secrets: they dilute. Your own is the strongest possible concentration, someone else’s already weaker, and so on until the secret is water running as freely through the village as from a burst main. And then everyone knew, and someone told my mother – low whispers over the counter of our gift shop, dark clouds gathering overhead.

Growing up, there’d always been terrible scenes between my sister and my parents. She was always disappointing them or cheeking them or doing too much on a Sunday or giggling in church or staying out later than she was allowed or being seen with a boy at the one dismal bus shelter or, later, giddy on one too many ciders down at The George. It doesn’t take a psychologist to see that I grew up to be cautious because Annie was always so bloody reckless. It was me quaking on the pew every Sunday – for her sins, not mine; her who took no notice of the fire or the brimstone; me who was ‘a good wee girl’; her who was ‘trouble’. That cape I had been trying on for years fitted, became comfortable, impossible to take off. I was the counterbalance for my beautiful, wild, impetuous sister, whose refusal to be contained turned out to be the very sealing of her containment.

But the night she told our parents, there was no terrible scene. No raised voices, no slammed doors, no cries of:

I hate you!

Mind your tone, young lady!

I can’t wait to leave this place!

Well, we’ll be putting you out in the morning, so off you go and pack a bag…

From the hallway, the only sound, beneath the high intermittent sobs from our mother, in tones so low and calm I could only just hear with one ear pressed against the living-room door, was my father’s voice: ‘You’ve made your bed now, right enough. You’re going to have to lie in it.’

They didn’t send her away like that other lassie whose name I forget but who we never saw again. Instead, over the weeks and months that followed, Dad cleared out the storage space above the shop and had a bathroom and a small kitchen put in. This astonished me, because from the way we lived, I’d always assumed we were poor. And in all of this, my sister: walking down High Street with people staring at her as if she’d been stripped naked and paraded before the eyes of the entire town. Shame. Shame on you. We know what you’ve been doing. Slut. Slattern. It’s hard to believe people still thought like that in 1981, but they did – some still do. Meanwhile, Malcolm, whoever and wherever he was, continued his life exactly as before. Even now, especially now, when I think of what she went through so young, I feel the burn of injustice on her behalf. But she bore it in silence, head tipped ever so slightly back, refusing absolutely to bow in any kind of gesture of penance. She toughed it out.

And then came my nephew, my tiny, raven-haired, pale-skinned Callum, lilac thumbprints under his eyes, mouth like a miniature rose. He looked, apparently, just like his father.

‘I want you to be his guardian,’ Annie said to me the day he was born. We were in the cottage hospital after a labour so quick he almost landed on the floor of the shop. In the bed, Annie looked peely-wally. I stood guard between her and the wooden crib where her brand-new boy slept with his fists raised above his head. Our parents had softened by then. Callum had thawed them simply by turning up.

‘I’ve told Mum and Dad I’m an atheist,’ Annie said – I can still remember the scandalised thrill that coursed through me. ‘They’ll have him christened all the same, you can bet on that. They’ll make me go for the sake of their reputation, and sure enough, I’ll go. But they don’t get to say what goes on in here.’ She jabbed her forehead hard with her forefinger, her nose and eyes wrinkled up tight. ‘So this arrangement would be between us. You would be Callum’s official guardian. I’ll write it down on a piece of paper and we can both sign it and then it will be a legal document, OK?’

On the woollen blanket, her warm, dry hands wrapped themselves around mine. Filled with the kind of seriousness that follows a huge bestowing of faith, I gave a grave nod. I had no idea what she was asking of me, only that it was big and that I was the only person in the world who could do it.

‘Yes,’ I said, but then blew it by asking her what a guardian was.

‘It’s the person who’ll look after Callum if anything ever happens to me.’

Heart quickening, I searched her face. ‘Why? Is something going to happen to you?’

She laughed; her near-white blonde hair fell across her face. ‘Of course not, you wee daftie! Nothing’s going to happen to me. It’s just… in case. If I, y’know, die or something.’

‘You’re not going to die, are you?’

‘No! No, no, no! It’s for, you know, when we’re grown up. If I died, you’d be Callum’s mummy. But I won’t die obviously. Promise.’

What promises we made. Promises we couldn’t keep, as it turned out.

Annie was devoted to Callum. But I soon saw how she’d changed. How she was changed. She was… diminished. I wish I’d been older. I wish I could’ve protected her from the judgemental stares, the whispers and the lack of support I didn’t have the experience to perceive as such. My parents were scared, I see that now. Naïve themselves, they believed absolutely they were doing what was right, teaching her to be responsible and to take the consequences of her actions. They were ignorant of how she might have continued to educate herself with a small child in tow. She did educate herself, in a way, continuing to read voraciously, and to paint the landscape of our homeland as a way of surviving, particularly once Callum started school. But in those early years, I would go to her flat after I’d finished my homework and hang out with her and my shiny new nephew. I’d take Cal for walks and show him off to those who had been so damning but who had knitted cardigans and blankets for him and dropped them off at the shop. I would see their cold eyes warm at the sight of my nephew, with his shock of black hair, his green eyes, his wee rosebud mouth.

‘We’ll bring him up together,’ I promised her, all through my teenage years. ‘We’ll run the shop when Ma and Pa retire and we’ll live next door to one another. I’ll have children too and we’ll be Auntie Annie and Auntie Isla.’

More promises broken.

But this photograph was taken before all that, at a time when we saw the world only as a place to stand in frocks made from old bits of fabric, a simple place, a safe place, in shades of black and white. I slide it into our father’s old wallet, which I kept back from our parents’ things. Their funeral was the second-to-last time I saw Annie. I took her pallor for grief, her weight loss for a life running a business and running round after Cal. I know differently now. I know I failed her. I know I should have been more vigilant. I know I should have watched over her better.

I know I should get a move on and get dressed – I can’t afford to be late.

Callum goes on trial today.

I’m drunk when I get the call. Later, I’ll feel guilty about this as well as all the rest. There’s a world of guilt waiting for me, but I don’t know that yet. I’m living another life entirely right now: my own. And, cautious as I am, even I don’t live my life as a constant precaution against disaster. Even I don’t say, Actually, I won’t have another drink in case I get a call that will put an end to everything I know.

And later, in my darker moments, I will remind myself that Annie wouldn’t have wanted me to live that way. No matter how little I saw of her these last few years, we always wanted the absolute best for one another, would have hated the idea of the other one suffering.

As for me, there I am: the quintessential single thirty-something. My life in London is… good. Area manager for Habitat – I love design, love my staff, love my job. A house in Clapham, which I bought using my savings plus my share of our inheritance. And Patrick is a great tenant – kind, tidy and a lot of fun. And if I’m drunk on a Wednesday night, it’s only because, in retail, Saturday is whatever day you’ve taken off in lieu of the Saturday you worked. This week it happens to be a Thursday, which makes Wednesday my Friday night, if you follow. Patrick and I have been at the Edge in Soho for a post-work just-the-one that has turned into a just-the-five, as it often does. My lips have gone numb, and when I move my head, I have to close my eyes and wait for my brain to catch up. So yes, drunk. Drunk is what I am.

The cab drops us outside my house in Englewood Road, just off Clapham Common. We stagger in, giggling. It’s one in the morning. In the living room, the phone is ringing.

‘Phone’s ringing,’ I say. Like that. Phone’s ringing. Like it’s nothing.

But the moment I hear Cal’s voice, I sober right up.

‘Auntie Isla? Is that you?’

‘Cal? Is everything all right?’

Patrick is staring at me – What? I shrug and shake my head – I don’t know.

‘There’s been…’ He breaks into sobs.

‘Cal? Cal, hon, can you talk? It’s OK, love. Just… just take a breath. Where are you?’

‘I’m at Mum’s…’ Another gut-wrenching sob. ‘Oh God.’ A gasp. Silence.

‘Cal.’ I slide down the wall; my bottom hits the hall carpet. ‘It’s OK. It’s OK, darlin’. I’m right here. Just… take your time. Take your time, OK?’ My heart has started to thud. I close my eyes, desperate for him to recover himself and tell me what the hell is going on. I don’t ask if it’s Annie. It doesn’t occur to me that anything could have happened to Annie.

‘It’s… I’m… It’s… There’s been a fire.’

‘A fire? Oh my God. Where? In the house? Are you OK? Is everyone OK?’ Still I don’t think of Annie.

‘Not in the house.’

‘Oh, thank God.’

‘No! No. They’re… they’re dead.’

‘Dead? Who’s dead?’ I glance up, but Patrick is no longer there. From the kitchen, I hear a tap running. I feel sick. I’m going to be sick.

‘There was a fire. I… I tried to… but…’

‘Cal? Just stop a second. You’re not making sense. There’s been a fire? In the house? Can you put your mum on?’

‘The fire wasn’t… Mum and Dominic were in the… Mum’s… She’s dead, oh God, oh my God.’ A terrible wail; my throat blocks.

Patrick is standing over me, holding out a glass of water. I take it from him and drink. Cold water runs down my gullet. The woodchip on the wall blurs.

‘That can’t be…’ My body fills with heat; a strange prickling sensation covers my skin. ‘She can’t be… She… Are you sure? Have you called 999?’

‘I tried to get to her, but… I called the fire brigade, but I couldn’t get to them. I couldn’t get to them.’

‘Get to them? Get where? Where, love? Can you tell me?’

‘Her studio. They were in her studio. It just went up. They’ve put it out now. There’s an ambulance. I tried to… but I…’

I am constructing what has happened from pieces. Down the line, sirens grow louder.

‘I think that’s the police,’ he says.

‘Cal? I’m coming, OK? Just… hold on. I’m on my way.’

The sirens stop. Another second, and I realise they haven’t stopped. Cal has ended the call.

‘Cal?’

‘Babe?’ Patrick is staring at me. ‘What’s happened?’

‘That was my nephew. He’s saying there’s been a fire. He’s saying my sister’s… He’s saying he thinks she’s dead. He’s saying she and Dominic are dead.’

Sitting on my living-room floor, half a glass of water in my hand, do I get anywhere near believing my sister might be dead? That Dominic has died too? Am I even remembering right? Did Cal say it like that or have I forced the jigsaw pieces together and got the wrong picture? Bewildered and sobering up fast, do I know Dominic and Annie were in her studio and that somehow it caught fire?

It’s possible I get that far. Just as it’s possible it’s no more than a cloudy feeling held at bay, the knowledge and what it means not yet solid.

Later, I lie in bed, my body held in tension from head to toe. Night trails shadows across my bedroom ceiling. Patrick has come into my room. He spoons against me while I wait wide-eyed until a coral dawn creeps up the bedroom window. It won’t be as bad as Cal said. He was hysterical. They wouldn’t send an ambulance if Annie and Dominic were already dead. The fire had been put out when he called, so it can’t have been too major. The police were on their way. I’ll get the earliest train. We’ll go to the hospital – Southampton, I should imagine that’s where they’ll have taken her and Dom. Cal needs me. He needs support.

Eight a.m. at Waterloo. I flip open my Motorola. Seven missed calls from the cottage – four from last night, three from early this morning when I must have been on the Northern Line. Flushing hot, I return the phone to my bag. Best to board the train before calling back. I don’t have a mobile number for Cal, and Annie doesn’t have one at all.

I hate the idea of folk being able to get hold of me every minute, I hear her say. It’s so oppressive.

My belly aches. The slick sheen of a hangover coats my skin. Last night, he must have been desperate, and where was I? And when he finally got through to me, I told him it would be OK. It isn’t, of course it isn’t. That was a reflex, the instinct to protect him. I still think of him as a child, even though he is twenty-two, maybe because he was only twelve when he and Annie left Inveraray, maybe because the heart-wrenching sight of him crying and waving out of the back window of Dominic’s big posh car is forever branded in my memory. Or maybe because he’s always had a childlike sensitivity that put him at odds with a world so much harder than him – just like his mother, my sister. My Annie.

On the train, I find an empty seat, throw my coat on the overhead rack and sit down. I take out my phone and place it on the table.

There’s been a fire. They’re…

Please, God, let Cal have spoken in panic. Please, God, let them have survived. God, if you’re listening, I will trade everything, everything I own – I will shave my hair, I will cut off a limb. Just let Annie be alive.

Last summer, Cal came to stay with me after finishing uni. His mop of black hair was bigger, floppier than ever; that hint of lilac still smudged beneath his eyes, his skin still pale as a vampire’s. A young man figuring himself out. I took a week off, took him to all the galleries, the museums, knowing that was what Annie would want me to do. He’d grown up a lot. We talked about art, about literature, films, television, favourite actors, his plans to move to London once he’d saved some money. He was trying on a smoking habit – Marlboro Lights. I didn’t remark on it, keen to let him have his youthful rebellion in peace. But I did laugh at him when I took him for a picnic on Clapham Common and he asked if I wanted to share a joint.

Oh God, I hope he was jumping to conclusions last night. I hope Annie hasn’t been scarred. And God? If one of them has to be dead, please let it be Dominic.

My face burns. What a dreadful thought. I am a terrible, terrible person.

A stunning black woman with her hair tied in a turquoise and pink scarf sits down opposite me and smiles. I try to smile back but have to look away. An image of Annie bandaged up in a hospital bed flashes, her beautiful face disfigured. I close my eyes. My head falls back against the strange upholstery of the headrest. A memory: Cal, aged no more than seven, standing on a chair; me teaching him how to use the pricing gun in our parents’ gift shop. Last night he called me as a child calls a grown-up – in the desperate hope they can put everything right. There’s been a fire. My nephew is alive. My sister and her husband are feared dead. I am the only person who would drop everything and run to him.

I call the cottage. At the sound of the ringtone, I straighten in my seat. When Annie answers, I almost shout for joy until, with a pressing feeling on my chest, I realise it is the answering machine:

‘Hi, you’ve reached Annie Rawles at Purbeck Cottage Holiday Rentals. I’m not here at the moment, but please leave your name and number…’

I end the call and grip my knees. Tears drop onto the backs of my hands. I have no tissues. I am not prepared. I am not prepared for any of this. ‘Oh God. Oh God, oh God.’

‘Are you OK?’ My fellow passenger is looking at me with concern.

‘Sorry. Just some bad news.’

She searches in her bag and pulls out a packet of Kleenex. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Take the pack.’

‘Thank you.’ I meet her eyes, see kindness. ‘Thank you so much.’

I head for the corridor, unsteady in the swaying motion of the train. The window is open. A cool rush of air chills my wet face. On the outskirts of the station, pollution coats the bricks black. I dial again. Brace myself for my sister’s voice. I want to listen to her over and over. I cannot bear to hear her speak.

‘… please leave your name and number after the beep and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.’

‘It’s me. If you get this, I get into Wareham at one fifteen. If you’re not there, I’ll jump on a bus. Don’t worry about me; I can find my own way. Just hang on, OK? I’ll see you at the cottage. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

At Wareham station, I spot Cal immediately. He is standing with a short blonde woman in loose dungarees who, when I wave, grips him by the elbow and points at me.

Together they walk towards me, their faces grim. Dread fills me. There are no fragile smiles, no sign that the situation is not as bad as I think. Cal is taller, thinner too, and as he gets nearer, I see that his eyes are hooded, the lilac smudges almost purple, his hair longer, pushed back off his face. He looks like Annie.

‘You came,’ I manage.

He pulls me into a hug. It is the embrace of a man, with a man’s breadth and strength. His neck smells of Imperial Leather soap. Annie always bought it, told me once it reminded her of our parents’ home, to which I replied that that made no sense, since she’d always been so desperate to get out of there.

We break apart. I smile a watery apology to the woman. Her hair is quiffed up, shaved at the sides, her skin etched with fine wrinkles.

‘This is Daisy,’ Cal says. ‘Mum’s best friend.’

‘Hi.’ I raise my hand and we lock eyes, hers large and pale blue, framed by eyelashes clumped into wet spikes. Brightly coloured feather earrings dangle from her lobes. She’s a Spanish teacher at Swanage Comprehensive – that’s all I know. You’d love her, Annie told me once. She did modern languages too! You guys can speak Spanish together!

Not today.

‘I’m so sorry.’ She wipes at her face with blunt square finger. . .