Chapter 22
22
CRYSTAL
Oh my God. I nearly ruined everything. I’d told myself I’d be able to hold it together when Gemma and I met for lunch, but as soon as she asked about my weekend, assuming it had been a jolly jaunt somewhere, or a get-together with my socially inept and lazy brother who hardly ever even bothered to call me, I just fell apart. And the more Gemma, bless her, kept fussing over me and begging me to let her help, the worse I became. Quite apart from the way I felt already about the weekend, she was making me feel worse by being so nice, so caring, so desperate to support me in return for… well, for what she saw as my support for her ; but of course most of what I did was because of how much I wanted to see Poppy; because of… yes, because of my love for Poppy.
So the more she said, the more she tried to comfort me, the worse I felt. I told her I was feeling guilty, I told her I’d lied to her. I was so close to telling her the truth about myself, I had no idea how I managed to stop at just the point of revealing my real name. And that was bad enough. It could have given everything away, ruined everything. But as soon as I’d said it, as soon as the name Suzie was out there, and the shock of saying it out loud had frozen me into silence, I knew it was still OK. Safe. There was no recognition on her face – no alarm, no sudden memory of what the name meant to her. She’d never heard of me. Thank God.
I explained how I’d come to be Crystal – no need for any lies there, it was all true, I even called myself Crystal at work. I did prefer the name, and discarding my real name in nearly every area of my life had helped me, just a little bit, to move on. Even my brother, when he remembered – when he even remembered I was alive – had got the hang of calling me Crystal.
Of course, there was still one area of my life where I remained Suzanne: on any official papers. So there were people who still called me Suzanne – but fortunately, they were the people Gemma wasn’t ever likely to meet. Not if I had anything to do with it.