“That’s why Dad killed himself, isn’t it? He couldn’t bear what you’d done?”

Her mum nodded, and it was as though Jess could feel her family’s foundations shifting beneath her. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me think he didn’t care about us when all along it was your fault he killed himself?” She was shouting now, her voice hot, her throat raw. “Why did you never tell me the truth? Why did you let me think Zoe might get better? Why didn’t you let me say goodbye?”

Decades of confusion and grief swam in Jess’s head until a single, lonely thought rose to the surface, a thought Jess had kept submerged for almost thirty years.

“All I ever wanted was to say goodbye.”

Chapter 62

Audrey

As Jess staggered up from the bench, Audrey reached out a hand and heard her own plaintive cry: “Jess, please don’t go.” But Jess wrenched her arm away and ran along the path, back in the direction of the hotel. Audrey felt her legs prepare to follow but as she tried to raise herself to her feet, it was as though her muscles had dissolved and there was nothing solid to hold her up. Her eyes followed Jess through the park until she rounded a corner and disappeared.

She turned to Lily, a horde of questions lining her throat. “Why did you never say anything? Why did you never tell me that you’d seen what happened?”

Lily was fiddling with one of the shiny black buttons on her jacket, popping it through the hole and then doing it back up again. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

“Why not? I can’t bear to think of you having kept that to yourself all these years. It must have been torture for you.” The thought of Lily alone with that burden of knowledge pressed down hard on Audrey’s windpipe, squeezing the air from her lungs.

“Because I knew it would be worse for you if you found out I’d seen it all. I knew it would make it so much harder for you.”

It took a moment for the lump in Audrey’s throat to make space for her voice to find its way out. “You were fifteen, Lily. You shouldn’t have had to deal with that all by yourself.”

Lily shrugged, and there was something in the gesture that rolled back the decades to the weeks after Zoe’s death, when Lily had demanded so little time and attention. Now Audrey couldn’t understand why she had failed to see that Lily was perhaps the most disturbed of them all. “I’m sorry, Lily. I’m sorry for what you saw, and I’m sorry you’ve been alone with it all this time. Have you never told anyone?”

Audrey watched the slow rise and fall of Lily’s ribs, wondering how she could love someone so much and yet know so little of what had troubled them for decades.

“No. But you don’t need to apologize. It’s not your fault I’ve kept it to myself. I couldn’t say anything . . .” Lily shook her head, deep vertical grooves indenting the skin between her eyebrows.