Chapter 26
THE SISTER
It’s funny how you’ve never noticed me all these years.
I’m nothing more than a dark shadow on the edges of your perfect life.
Something easily ignored as you swan around, floating from one success to the next without any effort.
But if you had paid any attention, you would have seen me. I’ve never been far away.
I went to visit your mum recently. The one who adopted you, not our mother. She let me into her home. She made me a cup of tea.
The poor dear was blind and confused during the whole thing, very vulnerable really. I put on my poshest voice, pretended I had a cold, and would you believe it, she thought I was you. It was so easy.
I won’t tell you the circumstances of the visit or what she said to me because that’s between me and her. But it made me realise what I could have had. How much easier my life would have been if I’d had a doting mother rather than the one I was stuck with.
Shall I tell you about my childhood?
There was a cellar in our house with a lock on the outside.
It was freezing cold and full of spiders and woodlice and mildew.
When my father was at work, she would take me down there and lock the door so she could go out.
I don’t know where she went or what she did.
I was always too afraid to ask when she eventually let me out.
I had chores to do most days and she held me back from school if I hadn’t completed them. It was hard to reach her standards. No plate was ever clean enough. No floor scrubbed hard enough. She took pleasure in my failure.
And if I didn’t do it right, she threatened to sell me.
What she didn’t realise is that it never sounded like a punishment to be sold away from her.
Until she told me the kind of person she would sell me to and what he would do to me.
And she warned me that if I tried to get help from my father, she’d immediately get rid of me and tell him I’d run away.
This bad man willing to buy me would take me out of the country or lock me in his cellar forever and ever.
Don’t you think it’s strange how one small circumstance can change a life? How it can shape a person?
You had the perfect family. You went to people who actually wanted you.
I did not.
Anyway. As soon as I met my man, I learned to survive. He is the most ruthless person I know, and he would kill for me. He would even kill you, sister, if I asked him to. He’d kill your entire family. And he’d enjoy every second of it.
I’ve read all your books, by the way. They’re darker than other children’s books. You don’t shy away from death, do you? That’s what I like about them.
But the rest of it is cloying. All that rubbish about how sisters are best friends and have a special bond.
It isn’t true. You, of all people, should know that.
People say the same thing about mums and daughters, that there’s this magical connection between them.
Mothers are supposed to be their daughter’s best friend, and no one wants to admit that there are terrible mothers in the world.
That they can be negligent and cruel and evil.
Why don’t you write about that?
I can give you a twisted story all about it.
If I visit your mum again, I might even tell her, too.