Chapter Thirty-One
Lissa presses her phone to her ear as she paces around the living room in her flat. The windows are open wide, and she can smell barbecue smoke from one of the neighbours’ gardens.
‘Enough,’ she says without preamble. ‘Enough, Mia. I hate this. I hate not talking to you. I miss you. I know you need some space from me, and I’ve tried to respect that, but we need to talk about it, okay?
I’m leaving my flat in two minutes and I’m coming to Bristol.
I think you might be on your way back from London, so I’m going to sit outside your place until you get home, and I thought I should warn you before I leave in case … Wait.’
She frowns in the direction of the front door, where someone is thumping. ‘That’s someone at the door. So I’m going to answer it, and then I’m going to come to yours. If you really, really don’t want me to, then you’ve got about forty-five minutes to let me know. Okay?’
She hangs up as she stomps down her corridor, needing to keep up the momentum. But when she opens the door, she stares in shock. Because it is Mia. With her red hair and her freckles and wearing if not exactly the same, then a very similar pair of dungarees to the last time they saw each other.
Lissa holds up her phone. ‘I was just talking to you.’
Mia cocks her head. ‘Huh. You’d have thought I would have heard.’
‘Talking to your voicemail,’ Lissa corrects.
‘Ah.’
There is a beat of awkward quiet between them. Lissa clears her throat. ‘What are you …?’
Mia gestures vaguely in the air. ‘I’m here to kiss and make up. If you’ll let me.’
Lissa laughs a little. ‘Let you? I was just calling you to warn you that I’m on my way to apologise.’
‘Trust you to warn someone about that.’ Then Mia sighs. ‘I suppose we think too similarly after all these years.’
Lissa snorts quietly at the suggestion. She doubts Mia would believe in past lives if they literally walked up to her and set fire to those dungarees. But right now, that’s not important. So she steps forward, wraps her arms around her cousin and breathes in her scent.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I should have said that weeks ago. And I should have known why you stuck around. I should have noticed what you were doing for me.’
‘I should have talked to you about it,’ Mia mumbles against her shoulder. ‘I shouldn’t have just assumed you knew how I was feeling without telling you.’ She breaks away, holds Lissa at arm’s length. ‘But enough with the shoulds, okay? Let’s think of what we could do in future instead.’
‘You know,’ Lissa says with a small smirk, ‘you sound a lot like the psychic I went to see.’
Mia wrinkles her noise. ‘Yeah. You never told me much about that.’
Lissa steps aside to let her into her flat. ‘I figured you wouldn’t want to know.’
‘Was it useful?’ Mia asks.
‘Yes. I actually think it was.’ Lissa glances at her. ‘Though apparently I’ve still got to make all my own choices.’
Mia sighs. ‘Damn. Sounds like a lot of effort.’
‘Well, quite. So, want a glass of wine?’ Lissa asks.
‘Love one,’ Mia says. There it is – olive branch extended and accepted. And they’ll be okay, Lissa thinks. Because of course they will.
‘Only one,’ Lissa says. ‘I’m picking Elsie up from town today.’
‘They’re finally loosening the reins, huh?’
‘Yeah.’ She opens the fridge, gets out a bottle of Sauvignon. ‘Though I suppose you can’t really blame them, all things considered.’
‘Suppose not, no,’ Mia concedes.
They sit on the sofa, Mia curling her legs underneath her. ‘So, I have something to tell you.’
‘Good,’ Lissa says, nodding. ‘Me too. But you first.’
Mia sets her wine down on the coffee table. ‘I think I’m going to do it. Go to New York.’
Lissa scans her cousin’s face. ‘For Lottie?’
Mia bites her lip. ‘Well, for me too, I guess. And for my parents. But yes, she’s a big part of it. I want to go, stay there for a few months. See if it could be anything real between us.’
Lissa reaches out to take her hand. ‘That’s brilliant, Mia.’
‘It is?’
‘Of course it is!’
Mia blows out a breath. ‘Okay. Okay, good.’ She pauses, biting her lip. ‘Maybe you could visit? Just for a weekend or something? It’s close enough for that, you know.’
Lissa nods slowly. ‘I’d love that. But …’
Mia pauses in the action of picking up her wine glass. ‘But?’
‘Well. I’m actually thinking of taking a little break from Bath myself.’
Lissa could swear that Mia’s jaw literally drops. ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’
‘No. Although I would love to take a picture of your face right now.’ Mia snaps her mouth shut, and Lissa laughs. And God, it feels so good to be here with her cousin like this. ‘I quit my job.’
‘You what?’
‘I know. And I think I’ve actually got a plan. I’ve been googling, and there’s this charity that runs camps for kids who’ve experienced loss. They’re looking for camp leaders, and I thought maybe I’d be okay at that.’
Mia’s eyes seem a little bright. ‘You’ll be great at it, Bissa.’
Lissa isn’t sure, but she won’t know until she tries, will she?
She can’t shake the memory of Rosy from the charity shop holding onto that bear to lay on her baby brother’s grave.
Okay, being a camp leader isn’t going to change the world.
But it’s something to help children like Rosy.
And maybe, for now, something is enough.
She takes Mia’s hand in hers, squeezes. ‘I’m happy for you, you know, Mia. About Lottie. I’m going to miss you, but I really, really hope it works out the way you want it to. However that ends up looking.’
Mia pulls Lissa into another hug. When she breaks away, her gaze darts over Lissa’s face. ‘And what are you going to do about Ash?’
And just like that, she’s back there.
I love you. I just thought you should know that.
‘I don’t know,’ she murmurs. She needs to make a choice. She needs to either tell him how she feels, or walk away for ever. She finishes the rest of that thought out loud. ‘I just … How are you supposed to know if the choice you’re making is the right one?’
Mia smiles, brushes Lissa’s hair back from her face.
‘I don’t think we can ever know that. But for what it’s worth, I think you’re doing the right thing.
’ Lissa frowns, and Mia shakes her head.
‘I just mean the moving abroad thing. I think focusing on yourself, doing something cool like that – it’ll be great for you, Bissa.
And it’s a lot harder to do if you’re thinking of someone else too, isn’t it? ’
Lissa nods slowly. But the truth is, she’s not sure what came first. Does she want to move abroad for herself? Or is she doing it to run away from him? It just feels so jumbled in her brain.
Mia seems to sense her uncertainty. ‘Maybe if it’s meant to be for you and Ash, you’ll get another shot at it in the future, once you’ve had the chance to live a little first.’
Lissa smiles, because Mia has no idea just how many shots she and Ash have had. But she holds onto the last card from her reading. Temperance. Timing. So maybe her cousin is right – maybe one day the timing will be right for them.
‘So then I said to Jess …’ Elsie enters into a long and detailed story about a fight between a friendship group at school, and Lissa nods along, trying to follow – which is easier said than done given that there seems to be a new name introduced every couple of seconds.
Still, it makes her smile that Elsie so willingly hands over details of her life now.
The way to a teenager’s heart is definitely through giving them lifts.
Possibly buying booze when they’re old enough, though she’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it.
‘Anyway,’ Elsie concludes, ‘Jess says she isn’t going to go to Kirsty’s party without me, so I guess we’ll see.’ She makes a sceptical face, one eyebrow crooking up.
Lissa laughs as she flicks the indicator to turn right. Elsie flushes and drops the eyebrow.
‘Too much?’ she asks. ‘This girl on the netball team can do it and I thought it looked cool.’
Lissa laughs again. ‘I love it.’ She pauses, then, ‘Chloe learnt to do it when she was little. Spent hours in front of the mirror practising, and it really wound me up because I couldn’t do it.’ It pops into her head, a snippet of a memory she hadn’t realised was there.
‘Really? That’s cool.’ Elsie looks out the window. ‘I wish I could have known her.’ Then she purses her lips, Lissa catching sight of it in the reflection. ‘Actually, though, that would never be possible, because if she hadn’t died I’d probably never have been born, right?’
‘Maybe,’ Lissa concedes. No way to know, is there? But Elsie is right to some degree – if their dad had never left to be with Nicole, Elsie wouldn’t have been born. So yes, she lost a sister. But she gained one too. And there’s something that feels full circle about that.
‘You still on the netball team then?’ she says, remembering the conversation all those months ago when Elsie claimed not to even like netball.
‘Yeah. It’s okay. I think Mum cares about it more than I do. But they’ve been a bit better recently, letting me do stuff, so I figure I’ll keep doing it for her for now.’
Lissa nods slowly. ‘Well, as long as you’re not only doing it for her. I’m sure she’d understand if you quit.’
Elsie only shrugs. Lissa isn’t quite well versed enough in her sister’s shrug language to tell what it means yet.
She taps one finger on her steering wheel. ‘So look, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’
Elsie gives her an almost horrified look. ‘Do not tell me Mum put the sex-talk crap onto you.’
‘What? No! Jesus. Although …’ Lissa frowns over at her. ‘Do you want to have the sex talk?’
Elsie wrinkles her nose. ‘No. I’ll let you know when I do.’
‘Okay. Deal. In the meantime, though …’ Lissa fills her in on what she told Mia and her mum – that she’s planning on leaving the country for a bit to volunteer abroad.
Elsie contemplate this for a moment, then grins. ‘Reckon Mum and Dad would let me visit?’
Lissa finds herself grinning too. ‘I definitely think we can work on it.’
Elsie waves goodbye to Lissa when they reach her house. As Lissa is putting the car into reverse to turn around, Nicole comes out, in a long green skirt and blouse, and gestures for her to wait. Lissa winds her window down.
Nicole bends her head when she reaches the car. ‘Want to come in?’ she asks.
‘Sorry, I can’t. I’m meeting a friend for a drink.’ Darcy wants to hear all about her plans – and then, Lissa thinks, she’ll have told everyone and there will be no going back.
Well. Nearly everyone.
‘Another time, though,’ she promises.
Nicole nods, but stays where she is. She fiddles with a bracelet on her wrist – gold and expensive-looking. ‘I wanted to say thank you,’ she says, stopping her fiddling and meeting Lissa’s gaze.
‘Of course,’ Lissa says easily. ‘It’s not that far to drive.’
Nicole nods again. ‘I … It’s nice to see you hanging out.’ She hesitates, then drops her voice a fraction. ‘We never wanted to push it, because we didn’t want it to feel like Elsie was, I don’t know, a replacement.’ It’s a harsh word and they both wince.
‘I don’t think that,’ Lissa says carefully. She used to, though, she realises. Not directed at Elsie herself, more at her dad, but still. A replacement family.
‘Well, anyway,’ Nicole continues, ‘it’s sort of why I kept my distance a little. And watching you the last few months … I wanted to say sorry, for not trying harder.’
Lissa frowns. ‘What do you mean?’
Nicole gestures to the passenger seat and Lissa nods. When her stepmum hops in, she cuts the engine.
‘It’s just,’ Nicole says, twisting the bracelet again, ‘I felt guilty for taking your dad away after you’d already been through so much.
And I wish, looking back, that I’d stepped in more.
It’s none of my business, your relationship with your mum,’ she goes on carefully, ‘but I could see when you were younger that you might have needed someone to talk to. But I was pregnant with Elsie, and we worried about what that would mean to you. Your dad was terrified about having another child, and I just …’ She swallows. ‘I could have done more.’
Lissa takes a moment to process that. The fact that her dad was terrified as much as anything else. ‘You couldn’t have,’ she says eventually. She doesn’t think she would have accepted help even if Nicole had tried to give it. And her mum certainly wouldn’t have.
‘I could have tried,’ Nicole insists.
Lissa thinks of Ash, asking if she ever tried to get to know Nicole. ‘We both could have,’ she says.
Nicole pushes a hand through her perfectly styled hair. ‘I’ve been a little protective of Elsie.’ Said like an admission. ‘Your dad … Well, it’s been hard to know what the right thing to do is.’ Lissa can see it now. The death of a child lingering over them all.
‘You don’t have to explain anything to me,’ she says. ‘But for what it’s worth, I think you’re doing a good job.’ Elsie seems happy and healthy, and willing to let Lissa in after years of a strained relationship. And that, as far as she is concerned, suggests good parenting.
Nicole smiles. ‘Thank you for saying that.’
‘I mean it. She’s pretty great.’
‘Yes. She is.’ She pauses. ‘Your dad … I know he doesn’t talk about it much, but he still holds Chloe in his heart. I just thought maybe you’d like to know that.’
Lissa swallows, nods. Nicole reaches for her hand, and Lissa lets her take it, feeling the pressure of Nicole’s wedding band on her skin. ‘And I hope you know too that you’ll always have a place in this family.’
Lissa squeezes Nicole’s hand back. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I think I’m starting to.’
A new start, she thinks. And hope on the horizon.