Ruby snorted in disbelief. Marianne did not love Ruby anywhere near as much as she loved Joanna. If it had been Ruby with an unwanted teenage pregnancy, would Marianne have taken the child in and raised it as her own? Of course not. By the time Ruby was thirteen, the same age Joanna had been when she’d had her, Marianne wouldn’t have been able to hide her little problem for long enough to pass the stringent requirements of the adoption process, the way she had the first time. She would have reeked of booze at the assessment interview.

“Drink makes you more truthful, I’ve heard.”

“No, it doesn’t do that,” said Joanna. “It makes you self-destruct.”

Ruby felt a pang of sympathy for Marianne—and squashed it. “I don’t want to get into this, not now. I just called to tell you that I’ve been fine. I’ve been staying with a friend. But I won’t need to now because I’ve just been given a council flat.”

“You’re not coming home?”

“Coming home? Where do you mean, Marianne’s? It’s not as if it’s your home, not anymore. You moved out years ago.”

She’d told Sam about the fact that Joanna was her biological mother, but in general, Ruby didn’t bother to explain to people. She couldn’t bear that look in their eyes; the pity, the fascination. Because it was a strange situation, no matter how much their mother tried to normalize it in those early years.

“I always wanted two,” Marianne had said to Ruby, more than once. “Yes, it was hard when Joanna got into trouble, but to me you were a gift. You were a gift to all of us. Jo finally got the little sister she always wanted.” As she grew up, Ruby thought, Is that really true, that she wanted a sister? It started to feel like a story they were using to dress up the fact that Jo conveniently got rid of the child she never wanted. Worse than a story: a lie. Marianne wanted another baby—that she believed—but it wasn’t Ruby she’d wanted. Ruby was always going to be a poor replacement for the baby Marianne had tried and failed to conceive herself.

Joanna herself was strangely silent on the subject. Since the older of the two left home to train with the police service, when Ruby was barely five years old, there had always been a distance between them. To outsiders, school friends and so on, they were sisters, but in the house, it was hard to say it out loud. It was only really Marianne who kept on with the “sister” thing. When Jo visited, Marianne would say, “Your sister’s home.” Ruby would raise an eyebrow, and Jo would look away. It always felt like they were pretending.