The tray wobbled as Harry sat down on the bed next to me and grabbed my hand. “Whatshe’sdone. Not you, Verity,” he said with fierce conviction. “You are not responsible, and what they did yesterday was unforgivable.”
“What happened to that teenager is unforgivable,” I whispered back, staring at the tray of food, my head pounding and my eyes losing focus.
“Yes, yes, it is,” Harry said, both hands moving to either side of my jaw so he could tilt my head back to look at him. “But that’s notyourfault. You weren’t even in the country. You said so yourself to the detective.”
I felt a stinging in my nose and my eyes filled with tears. “I know what I said, but I should have shut the house down or sold it. I knew it was sitting empty. I didn’t even make the effort to rent it out. Heath and I didn’t need the money. We’ve never needed money. It didn’t cross my mind that she could get access to it. Didn’t think about her making it like… like…” I trailed off and closed my eyes to shut Heath’s concerned ones out. “I should have known this would happen. If I’d just–” My throat caught, and I had to stop or I would have let out a full-on sob.
As it was, two tears escaped down my cheeks, and I felt Harry’s thumbs sweep them away before he dropped his hands from my face. I heard a clatter of cutlery as the tray was moved to the side, and then felt Harry get into the bed next to me. Next thing I knew, he was sitting up against the pillows I’d been on and pulling me right into his side with my face in his neck. I inhaled deeply, smelling his familiar aftershave cut with the clean, male, unique Harry scent, and it broke through my control. I started sobbing in earnest against him, my hands grabbing at fistfuls of his shirt as my tears soaked the material.
He held me against him and stroked my hair with one hand, rubbing up and down my arm with the other. I was crying for the teenager that got hurt, for all the guilty feelings I’d had building up since Mr Crawley told me what had happened. And a small part of me was crying for the children Heath and I had once been – the endless neglect we’d suffered that could have so easily led to a similar tragedy. It must have been a good ten minutes before I managed to get myself under control again. Harry was stroking my back now and murmuring reassuring things into my hair. My cheeks heated at the level of vulnerability I’d shown. I hated feeling so exposed.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked, wiping the tears from my face in embarrassed swipes.
“What are you sorry for?”
I tried to pull away from him, but he kept me anchored to his side. “I’ve ruined your shirt.” It was all I could come up with in the moment. I couldn’t say how I was sorry that I’d broken down. That I was sorry he had to see me so weak.
“I don’t give a fuck about my shirt.” He finally let me pull back but just so that he could lift me up against the pillows, again like a child, and plonk the plate back down on my lap. He then pushed my damp hair back from my face and kissed my forehead, before moving away to sit on the end of the bed. “Eat.”
I looked at the tray and my stomach lurched. I hadn’t been able to eat anything since I found out what happened at the house. All I could see were the photos from the police report showing the destroyed house and the blood on the road. But Harry made an impatient noise, and I picked up the grapefruit juice before he could go off on one again. Once I’d managed to drink some, I found I could eat just a bit of the pancake, and with the influx of sugars and carbohydrates, my brain started to revive from its sluggish state.
“Heath’s on his way out here, isn’t he?” I asked. Harry was standing by the bed now with his hands shoved into his pockets.
“Yes.”
I let my head fall back against the pillows and closed my eyes.
“Verity, why didn’t you talk to anyone about this? Okay, so maybe you didn’t want to tell me, but Heath’s your brother. And your friends care about both of you.”
“I want Heath to live a beautiful life. He deserves that. He…” I turned away and swallowed the bile that had filled my mouth before looking back at Harry. “He protected me. When we were children, he was always protecting me. I wasn’t as strong as him back then. But now it’smyturn. Now he’s going to be free.”
Harry took my hand. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. “Don’t you deserve to be free?”
I sighed. “You don’t understand. After the shit he went through I–”
“The shit youbothwent through, Verity.” I closed my mouth and looked away. “Why didn’t you ever tell me anything at school? The things Heath told me… I thought you lived in a castle, your every need met by servants.”
I shrugged. “That’s what you wanted to believe. It fitted your view of me. It fitted everyone’s view, and that served our purpose.”
“What do you mean?”
“If the full extent of the conditions we were living in had come out, we would have been taken away from that home. We would have lost our place at Downingham, and we loved it there. Mum and Dad made sure that we knew what would happen if the truth ever came out. The only other family we had was my granny, who was too frail to take us in, and then she died when we were fifteen. And you’ve got to understand, Harry,” I looked at him then, trying to get across how painful this was, “we wereashamed. Parents are supposed to love their children. When we were really little, we thought there must be something wrong with us – but as we got older, it was more that we were embarrassed of how we lived, how our parents lived.”
“Heath told me about the shed,” Harry said softly. “And why you had to move into it. That must have been terrifying.”
I blinked at Harry. “Heath’s been chatty.” I made to pull my hand from his as the old embarrassment swept through me, but Harry’s grip only tightened.
“I needed to know, Verity,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask you the right questions before.”
I slumped back in the bed and turned away from him, staring out of the window of the bedroom and for the first time noticing the view of the sea. “You can see why we loved school so much. Heath was a right short arse before we started at our first boarding prep school before Downingham. He must have grown over a foot by the end of the first year. He told you what he did to protect me?”
I glanced back at Harry and he nodded.
“So you can see why Heath’s done enough? Why it’s my turn now?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Harry said. “You don’t have to do it all on your own anymore. Neither of you do. Was my dad the first to ever question what was going on with you guys as children?”
I shrugged. “When we were babies, we had a nanny who was actually really nice. But they got rid of her when we were four or five after a visit from social services. They were pretty careful after that, so when we went to prep school at seven nothing was picked up. And it wasn’t like they were beating us. I mean Heath, and occasionally me, got the odd backhander from Mum if we got in her way, and Dad could be rough if he thought we’d touched any of his stuff or spoilt the dogs, but mostly it was just neglect. To be honest, I think they forgot we were there a lot of the time.” I laughed briefly and looked up at the ceiling. “You know what’s funny?”
