Chapter 51
iris
I don’t know if I’ve given Quinn enough to leave Rose alone. I have no idea what story she’s been chasing with my daughter, and Rose won’t tell me. I’ve just thrown my husband under a bus, and it may have been for nothing.
But I’m exhausted from living with the weight of our secrets. Jesse’s, Finn’s, mine. Maybe Amy was right: maybe it’s better for it all to come out. At least then the waiting would be over.
I let myself into the McMansion I’ve come to loathe, and drop my keys in the blue blown glass bowl on the hall console as I come in from the triple garage. That piece of glassware probably cost more than Amy’s rent for the year.
I didn’t expect to feel so unsettled by seeing my sister yesterday.
It’s not yet midday, but I pour myself a glass of Pinot Noir.
I don’t know what I was thinking, driving over to her apartment in the middle of the night in my pyjamas like a madwoman. I was so panicked about Quinn, about what she might discover, what Ashley Lincoln might say, and I didn’t know what to do—
—and so I turned to my sister.
As I always did.
As I always have.
Except she’s not my sister, not anymore. The pathetic woman fishing around in the sofa for a bottle of cheap whisky isn’t a person I recognise.
But she’s someone I helped create.
I take a deep slug of wine, trying unsuccessfully to swallow my guilt with it. I didn’t keep quiet about the dredger just to protect my family. I did it to punish Amy. To let her take the fall.
For what she did that night.
For having hope when I have none.
I loved Finn more than I’ve ever loved any human being on this earth. Even more than my beautiful, spirited, damaged Rose.
You’re not supposed to admit that, as a mother. I love them the same, that’s what you say. Even to yourself. If you’re feeling particularly brave, you might acknowledge that sometimes you get on better with one child. And then you quickly add the caveat: but I love them equally, of course.
Except you don’t.
And our children know. It’s the source of all sibling rivalry. I’ve often wondered how different Amy’s life would have been if our mother had truly loved us equally.
Would my sister’s choice that night on the boat have been different?
I’ve never admitted it, not even to Amy – especially not to Amy – but Finn’s father, Sean, was the love of my life.
He abandoned me and let me down and broke my heart, but his son was the best of him, the best of us, perfectly distilled into one beautiful boy.
Every time I looked at him, I saw the man I’d loved most in all the world.
God forgive me, but deep in my shameful, secret heart, I loved Finn more than Rose, the child I’d had with the decent, kind, loyal man I’d married but never loved, and the fates punished me for it and took my boy away.
I pour myself another glass of wine, and wander through the empty mausoleum into the vast, beautiful living room, with its multiple walls of floor-to-ceiling glass windows opening on one side to the lake, and on the other to a glittering S-shaped swimming pool.
So much water.
For fifteen months I’ve been filled with so much anger and hate. Yesterday, I could almost taste my rage; it rose up in me like bloodlust when my sister’s kindness stirred feelings in me I couldn’t bear to remember.
I hate her, but oh, God, I miss her, too.
It’s too late to go back now. Amy will never forgive me when she finds out I knew all along the accident wasn’t her fault. If I’d come forward and told the inquiry about the dredger, I could have saved her job, her reputation, her house; perhaps even her marriage.
I remind myself firmly she didn’t deserve saving.
She earned her punishment.
The collision wasn’t her fault, but what she did afterwards, what she made me do—
I wait for the familiar rage to swallow me. But when it finally comes, there’s a bitter, manufactured aftertaste, like artificial sweetener in your tea instead of sugar.
Witnessing my sister’s grief up close has shaken something loose inside me.
I will never stop mourning my son. There are still days when I can’t get out of bed.
But there are others when I wake up after an eighteen-inch snowfall to a perfect bluebird sky, and think, Finn was such a powder hound, and the memory makes me smile instead of cry.
The lump lodged beneath my breastbone that once made it so hard to breathe has shifted.
I’m learning to live around my grief, like an oyster layering nacre over a piece of grit.
I hear footsteps on the marble behind me. My husband hardly ever goes to work these days. He locks himself in his study, emerging only to eat, and often not even then.
‘Early to hit the bottle, even for you,’ he says.
I put the empty wine glass down on the piano. I look at Jesse, and for the first time in months I actually see him.
He’s lost so much weight it’s not just his clothes that hang off him. His flesh seems to sag from his bones in deep folds, as if his skin is sliding from his skeleton. The sockets of his eyes are purpled, his skin almost as grey as our son’s when they pulled him from the water.
I reach for the familiar disgust I’ve felt for so many months when I look at him, and once again I come up empty.
I can’t hate anymore.
‘Jesse,’ I say, ‘we have to tell Amy about Nicky.’