“I couldn’t. I knew that if I told anyone, I’d be putting Mum at risk. I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t do it to any of us.” Lily felt a fissure opening up in her voice.

“So you’ve been trying to protect Mum all this time? That’s why you didn’t say anything? You just wanted to protect her?”

Lily was about to nod but a series of memories crept into her head: Zoe and Jess sitting cross-legged on the bottom bunk, painting each other’s fingernails, brushing each other’s hair, whispering into each other’s ears. Zoe and Jess glancing at one another across the dinner table, silent communications indecipherable to all but the two of them. The way her sisters had finished each other’s sentences, how they had laughed at the same jokes and cried at the same books, how they had always known that the other was in distress long before it had been voiced.

As she glanced across the table to where Jess was awaiting an answer, Lily glimpsed a shadow of the ten-year-old girl who had sat on the edge of the sofa, encased in their mum’s arms, face contorting with grief as she was told of Zoe’s death. She heard the sound of Jess sobbing into her pillow every night after Zoe had died. She remembered coming down to breakfast each morning to the stippling of skin around Jess’s eyes, recalled the months that Jess’s face had seemed permanently mottled with grief. Lily had known what it was to lose a sister and she had always understood it was a bereavement from which she would never recover. But she had not lost a twin. And the incomprehensibility of Jess’s grief made Lily shake her head. “Not just Mum. You, too. Because if you’d known the truth about Zoe’s death, you’d have had to live with it. And you two were so close, I just couldn’t imagine how you’d be able to do that.”

Lily paused and it seemed to her that this was one of those moments when words were as delicate as eggshells and only the lightest tread ensured they wouldn’t get broken. “But isn’t that what you’ve been doing too, Jess? Isn’t that why you never told Mum what you suspected me of doing? Because you knew it would devastate her. Weren’t you just trying to protect her too?”

Chapter 65

Jess

Jess thought about all those times her belief in Lily’s crime had strained at the leash, urging her toward disclosure. All the times she had dared imagine the relief at unburdening herself. But each time she had been silenced by the same single image: that of her mum’s face crumpling with renewed grief. “Of course it was. I couldn’t have done that to her.”

Jess blinked and there it was: the image of Lily standing outside the door to the spare bedroom, arm twisted behind her, Jess so certain of the guilt on Lily’s face. As she replayed the scene, watching it afresh, knowing what she now knew, she could see her misreading so clearly: how she had mistaken distress for anger, fear for panic, grief for guilt. And the effect of that replay—watching, frame by frame, the shift in perspective, the change in meaning—was disorienting, bewildering. For the first time Jess recognized the grave simplicity of her error of judgment: one emotion exchanged for another, a story invented to ward off a trauma she was not ready to face. All these years she had supplanted anger for mourning, had punished one sister for still being alive out of grief for the one who was not.