Page 103 of The Half Sister

Lauren furrows her brow.

‘It must have been when it was all kicking off about the baby.’

Lauren nods and looks at the tattered tissue in her hands.

Kate leans her elbows on the table and holds her fingers at her temples, desperately trying to delve into the deepest corners of her mind to recall what happened next. The outline is there, she just needs to fill in the detail. ‘We were in the house and you stormed out.’

‘That’s when Justin and I had decided to keep it,’ says Lauren.

Hearing the boy’s name takes Kate back. ‘Mum and Dad rowed after you’d left,’ she says. ‘She accused him of not doing enough.’

‘Enough what?’ asks Lauren.

‘I don’t know,’ says Kate. ‘I thought she’d meant he’d not done enough to stop you from leaving. She said something like, “if you don’t put a stop to this, I will not be held accountable for my actions.”’

Lauren screws her face up. ‘She must have been telling him to stop treating me like a child, to stop trying to control me.’

Shecouldhave been, but now it doesn’t ring quite true to Kate. ‘I wonder if she was talking about you and Justin – that Dad hadn’t done enough to discourage you from seeing him, or...’ She trails off, not wanting to state what appears to be blatantly obvious.

Lauren fixes her with a hard stare. ‘Or...?’

‘Or maybe she thought he hadn’t done enough to stop you going ahead with the pregnancy.’

‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ says Lauren. ‘She told me that she was sorry but there was nothing she could do. She said that Dad had made his mind up and that was the end of it.’

Kate’s brain feels like it’s banging against the inside off her skull. ‘But after she’d gone to find you, I found Dad crying. He was in the study; you remember that room at the end of the corridor with the big open fire.’

Lauren nods. ‘What was he crying about?’

‘He just said that he was sad that we weren’t his little girls anymore. That all he’d ever wanted was for us to be happy.’

‘It was probably his guilty conscience,’ says Lauren, but Kate shakes her head.

‘Come on, had you ever seen him cry before?’

‘No.’

‘They were proper tears, Lauren. He was a broken man.’

‘Well, it wasn’t my fault that he couldn’t live with his decision.’

‘I don’t think it was his decision,’ says Kate, looking at Lauren. ‘I think Mum was telling him that he had to put a stop to it.’

Lauren shakes her head. ‘I think it’s more likely she had found out about his affair. It was all happening around that time.’

Kate takes a sip from her glass of water, wishing that it was a magic potion that would return her family to how it used to be. Somehow, it was easier to get along when all of their secrets were still hidden.

‘Had you told her you’d seen him with another woman by then?’ she asks.

Lauren thinks before answering. ‘No, that was after the summer holidays when I was in sixth form.’

‘Why would you do that?’ asks Kate, unable to keep the accusatory tone from her voice. ‘When you had no idea what was really going on?’

‘Because he’d just played the hand of God,’ cries Lauren. ‘How was it fair that he’d taken my baby away from me, then had a baby of his own behind our backs? How come he got to play happy families, when he’d left a trail of destruction behind him?’

‘What did Mum say when you told her?’

‘She fobbed me off and told me that it wasn’t what it seemed,’ says Lauren. ‘That she knew the woman.’

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