Page 31 of Dear Daisy

‘You and she . . . you’re still talking to Daisy? After everything I said?’

‘She’s my sister. And you, you’re nothing.’ And I spun around and marched over to Margaret, turning my back on Daniel Bekener and the expression I’d seen radiating from his eyes, a confused kind of sadness and what looked like an underlying horror.

Chapter Thirteen

Daniel Bekener @EditorDanB

Why do some people not admit they need help?

MichaelJJames @TwistyMikeJ

@EditorDanB Work that syntax!

Daniel Bekener @EditorDanB

@TwistyMikeJ Srsly, what is it? If you need help, why go all Snow Queen about it?

MichaelJJames @TwistyMikeJ

@EditorDanB Not everyone who needs help deserves it, think of that?

Daniel Bekener @EditorDanB

@TwistyMikeJ I can’t think like that. There’s different kinds of help after all.

MichaelJJames @TwistyMikeJ

@EditorDanB If this is what I think it is, give it up. You had a shot, it backfired, let it go.

Daniel Bekener @EditorDanB

@TwistyMikeJ It wasn’t what it looked like. There were things you didn’t know.

I sat up in bed and coiled the duvet into a knot around me. There was a cold sense of dread sitting over my head like a bad hat but an odd and conflicting sort of prickle of anticipation dancing between my shoulder blades at knowing that Dan was in Great Leys. I pressed myself against the chilly bars of the metal bed in which I sat like a Victorian orphan, trying to use the sensation to stop my thought processes, to distract me with physical pain from the circular torments that my brain was subjecting me to.

Dan is here. He’s going to keep following, watching, digging and poking away at you like a terrier down a rat hole, on and on until you break. I groaned and bunched the covers again. But he was perfectly civil this evening. No accusations, no nastiness and, let’s face it, he could have been very, very nasty, given the way it all went wrong. But he wasn’t. He was sad and tired and looked as though he genuinely meant it about coming to check that the book was progressing, rather than to hunt you down and persecute you. Maybe, maybe, that really is all he wants?

Oh, come on, Winter! He clearly doesn’t want you, does he? He made that very clear back in London and nothing has happened to change his mind. He knows that you and Daisy are still in touch, and that was his ultimatum wasn’t it — her or him? So, okay, he doesn’t want to be back where you both were before, so it must be the book.

I found that I was rocking slightly and forced myself to stop. To sit quietly and just breathe, feeling the cold night air singing in and out of my lungs, the soft, electric hum of my laptop and the ratchet-tick of the clock on the landing. Life. I have a life. Without Dan. I thought I would die of the pain and the horror and the loss when we split up, and the knife-edge terror of having to choose between my lover and my sister. I didn’t dare admit to myself how close I’d come, how close, to choosing Daniel, to relegating Daisy to my background life. I could hardly even get my head around the thought that I’d even considered it. But I got over losing Dan, I still have my sister and I’m still here, in my The Wolves of Willoughby Chase bed, with a half-written book on my computer. I can get through this.

I thought about speaking to Daisy, but didn’t know what to say to her. Would she take my talking to Dan again as a kind of betrayal, or would she understand? She’d never really understood my relationship with him, she’d thought of him as some kind of rival. And, despite all my reassurances that I could have them both, that he was no threat to her and me — how could he be, she was my twin, my other half — she’d been right all along. So any conversation we had tonight would either be accusations or justifications, and I didn’t think I could deal with any of that, not with the shock of him appearing out of the blue in the hall tonight.

I set the laptop to play some music, something suitably orchestral, while I lay down, trying to form the covers into something that didn’t resemble a beached whale. I closed my eyes and tried to force my mind to worry about the far more pressing and down-to-earth problem of how to deal with Scarlet and the school bullies.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Winter’s second book

Greg, I’ve found Winter. And, you were right. I’ve seen for myself that she’s still walking and talking and seeming to live a life; working, or at least saying that she’s working for all her eyes tell a different story. She looks . . . I dunno, sounds stupid, but she looks somehow as if she’s tight, strung out on late nights and bad dreams, like she lost a lot of weight very suddenly, not that she needed to but there’s that kind of hollowness about her. Eaten out from the inside. And I don’t know what’s done it, if it’s the writing, or even me, mate, yeah, not absolving myself from my part in the fiasco. So I laid it on a bit thick that I needed to work, that we need the book — okay, I know we do, but the way I told it you’d think we’d started taking out payday loans or something; Christ, sorry man, but I made us sound desperate just so I’d got an excuse to stick around and drag that book out of her.

So I’m here if you need me, playing a long game. Trying to respect the image she’s putting across, hoping that she’ll give me a free pass on what I said back in London, but I know she won’t. She can’t forget, our Winter, that’s her problem. Can’t forget, can’t let go.

Anyhoo. Drop me a line if you need me, otherwise I’ll be in touch.

Dan

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