‘I’m sorry, Lily. I really am truly sorry. I know that what I’ve done is unforgivable. I wish you could know how much I hate myself for it. I wish you could know how sorry I am.’ She swallowed, the muscles in her throat conspiring against her. Ben’s words echoed in her ears and she raised her head, looked directly at Lily, holding her gaze. ‘I’m sorry for cutting you off all this time. And I’m sorry for the impact it’s had on you, on Mum, on all of us. I don’t expect you ever to be able to forgive me but if there was any chance we could … I don’t know … If there was any chance we could just not hate each other …’ She faltered, words eluding her. She dropped her head, pulling at a loose thread on her blouse, winding it round and round her finger until it dug into her flesh.
‘I’ve never hated you, Jess. Never. I’ve been angry with you. I’ve been bewildered by you. There’ve been times I’ve wanted to scream with frustration at you. But I’ve never hated you. You’re my sister and I love you. I love you even when you’re acting in ways I don’t understand, even when I don’t see you for years. I never stopped loving you.’
Jess blinked and watched one tear, then another, drop onto the thighs of her jeans. It was only once she’d counted a dozen that she felt able to lift her head and find her voice. ‘I love you too, Lily. And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’
They reached out and found one another’s hands across the rosewood table, their eyes clouded with tears, and it was as though all the years of separation were slowly dissolving.
‘I’ve got some tissues in my bag. Let me get them out.’
Jess sniffed loudly as Lily burrowed in her bag and emerged with a packet of tissues, handing one to Jess. ‘Are you OK?’
Jess nodded, even though she wasn’t quite sure what it meant any more. ‘You?’
Lily smiled, and it was as if her sister were transforming in front of her: no longer the monster Jess had spent almost thirty years imagining her to be, but a woman who had spent as long as Jess imprisoned by a secret she had felt compelled to keep for the protection of others.
‘It’s going to be OK, Jess. We can do this, I know we can.’
Lily smiled at her again, and Jess wanted to reciprocate but there was still so much to be resolved. ‘What about Mum …?’
‘Do you think Mum’s OK …?’
Their questions collided and they each stopped abruptly, their eyes catching and releasing like a hook and eye fastening that couldn’t quite hold.
‘You go ahead. In what way?’
Jess paused, trying to untangle a knot of feelings, unsure whether she could work her way from the guilt at one end to absolution at the other. ‘When Zoe died I felt as though a part of me had died too, a part of me I knew I’d never get back. And I haven’t. There’s always been a part of me missing. And now, knowing what Mum did … I can’t help feeling it was Mum who stole that part away from me and I don’t know how to forgive her for it.’
Fresh tears began to fall down Jess’s cheeks and as she wiped them away, Lily began to speak.
‘I know none of us can ever completely understand what it was like for you. I guess only another set of twins could. But however hard it is to accept, Zoe was going to die whatever Mum did. There’s no changing that fact. And however conflicted you are with Mum right now, ask yourself what you’d have done in her position. What would you do if Mia was sick, if she was in that much pain, and you knew she wasn’t going to get better? Are you honestly telling me, as a mother, that you wouldn’t want to do something to put an end to her suffering, however awful that thing was? Because I’d like to think that, if I could find the courage, I’d do the same for Phoebe.’
Jess tried to imagine how her mum must have felt as she’d sat on Zoe’s bed and given her the overdose. She tried to envisage what must have gone through her mind as she’d filled the syringe, as she’d administered the excess of morphine, as she’d watched her daughter die. She tried to imagine ever having to do that for Mia but her temples throbbed, resisting the image.
She thought back to that day, walking through the front door, knowing instinctively that Zoe was dead and yet hoping that, if only she could stand still long enough, perhaps she could stop time – reverse it, even – so that the future, when it arrived, might be different.
‘Do you know what I find hardest? I can’t even remember the last thing I said to Zoe. She was my twin sister and I can’t recall my last words to her.’ Jess wiped at her tears, aware of having said something she hadn’t been able to acknowledge to herself all these years.
‘I know, Jess. I understand, really I do. But you can’t undo the past. And things with Mum … well, they’re different now, aren’t they?’
Jess thought about her mum wandering alone around Central Park, nursing her disappointment that her longed-for trip to New York had gone so horribly wrong on its first day. She pictured the way her shoulder blades now jutted out from her clothes like stunted wings. She remembered her mum lying under the stiff hospital sheets in A&E less than two months before and how, in the split second after she’d swished back the curtain, the panic Jess had felt was not about seeing Mia and Lily in the same room together but about seeing her mum so frail under the harsh strip lighting.
Jess allowed herself to imagine how lonely and isolated her mum must have been all this time, knowing that the only person in whom she had ever confided about Zoe’s death had found her confession so intolerable that he hadn’t been able to live with it.
Pulling at the soggy tissue between her fingers, she knew that a part of her would always wish things could have been different. She would always wish that she had been told about the severity of Zoe’s illness and that she’d known the truth about her death. But most of all Jess wished, very simply, that Zoe had never got ill. And that was a wish, she admitted to herself for the first time, that hadn’t been in anyone’s control: not hers, not her mum’s, not Lily’s or their dad’s. Not the doctors’ or nurses’ who had tried so valiantly to cure Zoe. Jess realised that she had spent all these years being angry with Lily because it was easier to feel anger than it was to feel grief.
She knew how easy it would be to allow her anger to find a new focus in her mum. But as she glanced towards the entrance and saw her mum standing hesitantly in the doorway, as though unsure whether she was yet ready to cross the threshold, Jess felt something shift inside her: her anger being edged to one side and, in its place, the acute sense of loss she had spent so many years smothering with fury.
Chapter 66
Audrey
Audrey scanned the room until she saw them in the far corner, sitting opposite one another at a round rosewood table. She stood completely still, watching Lily and Jess, wishing she could know what had already been said.
Hovering in the doorway, she felt all her regrets lining up behind her lips as if determined to take one final collective curtain call before it was too late. She watched her daughters, her breath unmoving in her chest, her lungs clinging to every last drop of air.
And then she saw it. She saw their hands reach across the table, saw them hold one another for the first time in years. It was a moment of complete stillness in which she felt she was watching their estrangement evaporate, like condensation rising from a frozen, sunlit lake. She caught an unmistakable glance of sympathy pass from Lily to Jess, a look that was received, accepted, reciprocated: such a simple exchange and yet one which made Audrey’s lungs inflate.
This, Audrey thought, as she watched the tears trickle down Jess’s cheeks, as she saw Lily reach into her bag to hand her sister a tissue, as she watched a conversation resume after decades of unnecessary silence: this was all she wanted. Seeing her daughters together, daring to hope that they might be there for each other once she could no longer be there for either of them. For years it had seemed such an impossible dream. And yet here they were, engaging in something so unremarkable in the grand scheme of things – a conversation between sisters in a bar on a Saturday evening – yet it seemed to Audrey to be one of the most vital, precious things in the world.