Lily holds her sister’s gaze, willing Jess to turn and walk away. And when, eventually, Jess retreats and begins to go down the stairs, Lily knows she must follow close behind.

All the way to school Lily manages not to cry. She must not let Jess see that she is upset, must not let her know that there is already cause to be grieving. But when they reach the school gates—when she has safely deposited Jess in the junior school playground and rounded the corner to her own senior school—she walks up the stairs to the top-floor toilets that are always empty at this time and locks herself inside. There she allows the horror of the past thirty minutes to catch up with her in loud, lonely sobs that reverberate around the cubicle as if they will never be silenced.

Chapter 61

Jess

Jess’s head reeled: a sense that the bench, her body, her feet were no longer anchored to the ground.

Her mum looked at her and Jess saw it in her eyes: an expression that tipped Jess’s world onto a different axis, sent it spinning out of control.

And then there was a torrent of words, unstoppable and unrelenting, her mum talking and talking, confessing to something Jess didn’t want to hear: something that undid the past and recast the present.

“You have to believe me, both of you. I did what I thought was best for Zoe.”

Her mum dragged a tissue along her cheek and Jess turned to look at her, but it was as if she were staring at a stranger. “The best? How can you say that? How can that possibly have been the best for Zoe?”

There was hysteria in her voice, and passersby turned to stare but her words had a momentum of their own and Jess couldn’t stop them.

Her mum reached out, tried to take her hand, but Jess yanked it away.

“She was going to die, Jess. There was nothing any of us could do to change that. We brought her home to die.”

Her mum spoke softly but the words jabbed into Jess’s chest. “Why didn’t you tell me that at the time? Why did you all pretend that she was coming home because she was better? You should have told me the truth. She was my twin. I had a right to know.”

Her mum began to weep again, and Jess turned her head away, felt the blood pounding in her ears. “What about Dad? Did he know? Did the two of you plan it together?”

Her mum coughed into her hand, wiped it on a tissue, shook her head. “Dad wasn’t involved at all. He didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t tell him until after the funeral.”

Pieces of a jigsaw Jess had never been able to complete began to slot into place. Hazy scenes from her childhood pulled into focus as if they had been waiting all these years to be restored. Coming in from the garden one day that summer—barefoot, unintentionally silent—hearing her parents hissing at one another in the kitchen, the words long since forgotten but the tone of animosity and contrition still audible in her ears. Her dad’s changed demeanor that summer, his kindness and affection replaced by distant coldness, and Jess’s belief that it must be her fault for reminding him of the daughter he had lost. The four of them having Sunday lunch, the kitchen silent save for the muted orchestra of cutlery against crockery, her mum reaching out a hand toward her dad’s arm and him flinching, glaring at her and speaking with a ferocity Jess had never heard before: Don’t. Just don’t. All those nights her dad had failed to come home before Jess went to sleep, all those nights she had lain under the duvet, alone on the bottom bunk bed, believing her dad could no longer bear to be in the same house as her because he resented her for still being alive when her funny, brave, superior twin was dead.