A familiar wave of anger rose in me, too. I pushed it away, willing the swell to calm.
‘It was clear that you were ready for help, though. You slept for almost two days, do you remember?’
I nodded.
‘I didn’t know how I’d cope, at first,’ Auntie Sue said. ‘But the three of us muddled through those first few weeks, and before long, I couldn’t imagine life without you and Amy. In the end, there was no choice – I had to give up my old life. I thought I’d go back, eventually, picking up the pieces and carrying on from where I’d left off. But the weeks became months, and then years, and that life slowly faded into memories.’
My gut wrenched with a pang of familiar grief for the life that Auntie Sue had made and lost, and the pain of being asked to sacrifice everything for someone else. My job, my friends, my life in Hong Kong, the life I’d created for myself – it was still going on, just without me in it.
There was something else she wasn’t telling me, a secret that flashed behind the sadness in her eyes, betraying its true depth. She had lost more than she was letting on. And suddenly it occurred to me. Auntie Sue had always been single. It was one of those things that had just been, that I hadn’t questioned, and the circumstances of how she came into our lives meant that I’d never thought to ask.
‘You were with someone, weren’t you? In Aberdeen?’
‘Yes. I was, yes.’ Auntie Sue’s eyes glistened.
I gulped hard. ‘And you gave him up? For us?’
Auntie Sue took a sip of sherry and nodded. ‘Her’, she said. ‘And her name was Emily.’
She wiped away a tear on the back of her hand and my heart broke again – a tightening in my chest that was harsher and deeper than any pain I’d ever known. The irony of my situation was suddenly too much to bear, a parallel line drawn across my family history and binding us in an unbreakable curse. I wept for everything we had all lost.
Chapter Fifteen
I stared at the ceiling from my makeshift bed on the sofa. It was early, too early to be awake, and the house was still. Even though Puffin Cottage was only a short walk away, I had stayed over at Mum and Auntie Sue’s so that I could be there when Rachel woke up. My grief – all the many losses – had balled into one, a tangled knot of wool, so that I couldn’t see where one ended and another began.
I ached for a chance to ask Amy what she had been thinking and how she had got herself in to such a messy situation. I wouldn’t even have been mad with her. We had spent our whole lives easily forgiving each other’s misdemeanours, and this could have been like all those other times when we would argue, sulk, and quickly fall back into the established rhythm of us. And while having an affair was worse than any fuck-ups either of us had made before, I just wanted to see her. It didn’t matter what she had done, or the hurt she had caused, or the chain of events she had set in motion. I craved her face, her smell, the sound of her voice. I just wanted my sister.
After reminiscing with Auntie Sue the night before, I had more sympathy for Mike. Losing Dad had been hard for us, but it had almost killed Mum, and she had never properly recovered from it. As difficult as this was for me, my grief for Amy was nothing next to the pain Mike had to deal with.
The dark clouds of a murder investigation and a trial were gathering on our horizon. There would be courtrooms, lawyers and judges, journalists. Amy’s life would be ripped open and forensically examined, then held up for everyone to see. Nothing would be sacred, and there would be nowhere to shelter from the truth – or from the hurt. I could only imagine what it would do to Mike. I needed to be better for him, and for the kids. And Rachel, and Mum, and Auntie Sue… I needed to be better for all of them.
I wasn’t going back to Hong Kong. I couldn’t. Whatever I’d had before, wherever I had thought my life was going, that was over now. It would be easier for me to cope if I accepted it and moved on. A trial could take months. We would be battered and bruised by the process, from the scrutiny on us, and it would take years to recover – if we ever did.
I had to acknowledge what Amy had asked of me regarding the children, and I wondered if there was more to her wish than it first seemed. Had she known that Phil could do something like this, and made plans just in case? Was that what she meant by running out of time?
Auntie Sue had saved me and Amy, that much had always been clear to me. And now it was my turn. The circumstances weren’t the same – at least Mike was still here. But a murder investigation would shake each of us to our core. It was my job to shelter the children from the storm that was heading our way and I knew then that I would do whatever it took to protect them, however long it took. It would be ten years until Betsy turned eighteen, and by that time, the life I knew today would be long gone.
With my mind made up, I could focus on what to do next. The first priority was to resign from my job and sort
