‘Iwantedhim to be attracted to me,’ Fi confessed. ‘I wanted to be like everybody else and to get over how stupidly shy I’d always been. I wanted…him.’ Her inward breath became a gulp. ‘I thought I was in love with him.’
‘You wanted a lover,’ Ellie said quietly. ‘Not arapist.’
‘Fiona?’ Laura’s quiet voice broke a short silence.
‘Aye?’ Fi’s response to Laura was wary. She knew this was serious if her full name was being used. She also knew she had no choice but to make eye contact with her sister.
‘Listen to me. It was…’ Laura pulled in a quick breath and her next words came out slowly and deliberately. Quietly vehement. ‘…Not. Your. Fault.’
Ellie was nodding, tears streaming down her face.
And then they were both hugging Fi. Until she felt she couldn’t breathe and it was too much. Any physical touch from a human was an intrusion into her personal space that made her hover close to that fight-or-flight button that would release all the adrenaline she might need. These were her sisters and she knew perfectly well that she was safe, but she still needed the buffer zone of at least a little physical space. She had to wriggle free.
They understood. Instantly.
Ellie sat back, rubbing her nose and sniffing. Laura got to her feet.
‘I’m going to make us all a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘And then you’re going to tell us the whole story, Fi, because there’s no way we’re going to let you believe, ever, ever again, that it was, in any way,yourfault.’
* * *
Fi didn’t tell them quite thewholestory.
She left out the bits that would have hurt them. Like the freedom she’d felt when she’d gone far enough away from home that she was no longer just one of the ‘Gilchrist lassies’.
The middle one.
The pony-mad one.
The chubby one – with the hair like a wire pot scourer, poor bairn.
She’d been the first of them to leave home and she’d gone all the way to the University of Surrey, where she’d earned a place on a five-year course for veterinary medicine and science. The confidence gained by doing so well in her first-year subjects of anatomy and physiology had given her the courage to try and be more like her sisters. To fit in. To be seen.
She did tell them how special she’d felt when one of the professors, Murray McKay, noticed her, praised her work and took the time to encourage her. How, over more than a year, she’d developed such a crush on the charismatic, good-looking man who had to be in his early fifties. She confessed that she’d begun to take note of advice the other girls who lived in the residential halls gave each other and had started to experiment with make-up and clothes that revealed more of her generous cleavage.
She told them how he’d offered to help her, one evening, with an important essay and had worked with her for so long they were the only people left in the building. She admitted that she’d been thrilled when he’d kissed her. But that everything had changed after he locked the office door. That it went too far and he just wouldn’t stop even when she’d begged him to.
She didn’t tell them that he’d put his hand over her mouth to stop her talking any more. Or screaming. Because Ellie was already crying.
Laura was as white as a ghost and her voice was shaky. ‘How could we not have known that something that terrible had happened to you?’
She didn’t tell them how she’d tried so hard to pretend to herself that nothing terriblehadhappened to her. That she’d put her head down and focussed on her studies, but that hadn’t stopped her grades from plummeting when she discovered that she was never, ever going to be able to get past what had happened because she had a reminder, inside her body, that was going to be part of her life forever. But she couldn’t even go to what had happened after that in her own head, let alone confess what she had done. That she reallywasthe murderer that everyone had said their father was. Maybe it was selfish to protect herself from anyone else ever knowing what the real ending had been, but this wasn’t negotiable. Fi could feel that mental door slamming shut hard enough to make her whole body shudder.
‘I didn’t want you to know,’ Fi said, her voice shaking, but that only made the truth of her words more genuine. ‘So I didn’t come home. It was easy to say that it was too expensive to travel that far and that I had to study for my exams and that I needed my holiday work at the riding school to help pay for next year’s fees. I didn’t go back the next year, but it was months before I told you all that I’d dropped out.’
‘You said you’d changed your mind about being a vet and you wanted to be a farrier and you’d been offered an apprenticeship.’
‘Ihadbeen offered the apprenticeship. That bit was true. But it was even harder to come home after I’d dropped out,’ she added. ‘Because I couldn’t face Mam. Not after all that money she’d put into helping me go to vet school. I knew how disappointed she would be in me, giving up on my dreams like that. Our family had had enough to be ashamed of. If people at home found out what I’d done, it would have started all over again.’ Her voice dropped to being barely audible. ‘They’d have said I was no better than my father…’
‘Mam wouldn’t have been bothered by any gossip. Nobody would have found out, anyway. She was worried about you. We all were.’
‘Did you tellanyone?’ Ellie asked.
Fi was silent. She hadn’t even toldthemeverything, but her own words were failing her now – because she could hear echoes of words she’d never been able to bury completely. Words she could never say aloud herself because that might bring them back to life and make them real enough to destroy her all over again.
‘You wanted this, you can’t deny it. And don’t bother telling anyone, because no one would believe that you weren’t begging for it. Everybody’s seen the way you’ve been throwing yourself at me. I finally took pity on you, that’s all. I mean… look at yourself in the mirror, Fiona Gilchrist. Who’d want you…?’
The look on her face must have said more than enough because Fi found herself wrapped in the arms of both her sisters.
