The Sun Sister (The Seven Sisters #6) - Lucinda Riley Page 0,103

for her and the way she was overshadowed on every level by my nemesis sister, CeCe. I’d write Star a letter anyway, just to say hello, because I couldn’t think of anything bad I’d actually done to her specifically.

CeCe. I ground the nib of the pen hard into the paper. She and I had never gotten along; Ma had always said we were too similar, but I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t like the way she’d dominated Star, and sometimes when we were younger, we’d fallen out and had physical fights that Ally had to break up. I’d been glad when I’d heard that she’d moved to Australia.

‘Basically because Star dumped her for a man,’ I murmured maliciously, knowing Fi and the group therapy crowd wouldn’t like that negativity, but you couldn’t like everyone in the world, could you? Although apparently, you could get them to forgive you.

For now, I put a question mark against CeCe’s name and then moved on to Tiggy.

As an adult, she had definitely morphed into the kind of person who could probably apply for a job here. Then I metaphorically slapped myself for being bitchy about her, because she didn’t deserve it. She was sweet and gentle and just wanted to make everybody happy. We were polar opposites, yet I aspired to be like her because she could see the good in everything and everybody, whereas I was wired the opposite way around. I vaguely remembered Ally telling me at Atlantis that she’d had a health issue. To my shame, I hadn’t even dropped her an email to ask how she was. Tiggy was definitely going on my list of apologies.

I then sat back and wondered whether, if Pa were alive, I’d be wanting to write him an apology. No. I felt he should be writing me one, having died when I was still so young and leaving me to deal with all this stuff. Including Stella, my grandmother. Anyway, I didn’t want to think about all that, so I moved on to my New York life.

Mariam: MASSIVE APOLOGY, I wrote. She was by far the best PA I’d ever had, although I had no idea whether she was still my PA. I put that on my list to ask Maia when I replied to the email she’d sent me a couple of days ago. We were allowed our laptops and cell phones for an hour each day, but everything we wrote was monitored, so I hadn’t written to anyone so far.

Stella, a.k.a. ‘Granny’. I paused and chewed the end of my pen as I navigated the brain fuzz that was the last few weeks before I’d come here. Truthfully, I couldn’t remember much about our conversations, though I did remember waking up and her sitting in the easy chair by my bed. I also thought I remembered her singing, but maybe that had been a dream. Although even in the haze of my couple of meetings with her, I remembered that she was truly one of the scariest humans I’d ever met.

Before I could decide whether I should write her, my attention was caught by a super tall black guy who walked past me with a tray of food. Unlike most of the inmates who wore hoodies and track pants like me, he was dressed in a crisp white shirt and chinos. I hunched over my paper with my head down as he went to sit at the table opposite. I normally didn’t give a shit who saw me looking as rough as hell, but I glanced to my left and saw he was crazily beautiful, and had a certain elegance about him. Before he could spot me, I put my hood up, picked up my tray and the pen and paper and left the canteen.

When I arrived back at my dorm, Vanessa’s bed was empty and Lizzie was involved in her usual night-time beauty regime, her desk transformed into an expensive cosmetics counter.

‘Where’s Vanessa?’ I asked as I watched her lather cream onto her face, use a pipette to put drops of what she said contained gold flakes onto her neck, and swallow a series of pills that had been okayed by the doctor, so must contain a bunch of nothing.

‘The poor little mite started having a seizure, so I called the nurse and she’s been taken back to the clinical detox ward,’ Lizzie sighed. ‘I just hope it’s not too late.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Electra, surely you must know the effect that heroin