as me, pushing back her metal stool so that it toppled and fell with a ringing clang onto the concrete floor. “You can fuck off as far as I’m concerned, we don’t want you, we don’t need you.”
There was a biting retort on the tip of my tongue, but somehow, as she stood there, the kitchen spotlights making her tousled, tangled blond hair glow like fire, with her face twisted into a grimace of rage and pain, she looked so like Maddie, so like me, that my heart gave a little skip.
I remembered myself, age fifteen, coming in after curfew, standing in the kitchen with my hands on my hips, shouting at my mum, “I don’t care if you were worried. I never asked you to stay up; I don’t need you looking out for me!”
It was a lie, of course. A total lie.
Because everything I did, every test I aced, every curfew I broke, every time I tidied my room and every time I didn’t—all of it was aimed at one thing. Making my mother notice me. Making her care.
For fourteen years, I had tried so hard to be the perfect daughter, but it was never enough. No matter how neat my handwriting, no matter how high I scored in the spelling test, or how good my art project was, it was never enough. I could spend a whole afternoon coloring a picture for her, and she would notice the one place I had sneezed and jerked my pen across the line.
I could spend my Saturday tidying my room to perfection—and she would grumble that I had left my shoes in the hall.
Whatever I did was wrong. I grew too fast, my clothes were too expensive, my friends were too noisy. I was too chubby, or conversely, I picked at my food. My hair was too messy—too thick, too hard to tame into the neat plaits and ponytails she favored.
And so as I crossed the line from child to teenager, I began to do the opposite. I had tried being perfect—so then I tried being imperfect. I stayed out. I drank. I let my grades slip. I went from total compliance to serial defiance.
It made no difference. No matter what I did, I was not the daughter I should have been. All I was doing now was confirming that fact to both of us.
I had ruined her life. That was always the unspoken message—the thing that hung between us, making me clutch at her even harder as she pulled away. And at last, I couldn’t deal with seeing that truth in her face anymore.
I left home at eighteen, with nothing but a handful of mediocre A levels and the offer of an au pair job in Clapham. By that time I was old enough not to have a curfew, or someone sitting up for me past their bedtime, reproach in their eyes when I came home.
But I was very, very far from not needing anyone to look out for me.
Maybe Rhiannon was too.
“Rhiannon.” I stepped forward, trying to keep the pity out of my voice. “Rhiannon, I know that since Holly—”
“Don’t you dare say her name,” she growled. She took a step backwards, stumbling on her high heels, and suddenly she looked like what she was—a little girl, teetering in clothes too old for her that she had barely learned how to wear. Her lips were curled in a way that could have been anger but I suspected meant she was trying not to cry. “Don’t you dare talk about that slut-faced hell witch here.”
“Who—Holly?” I was taken aback. There was something here, something different from the generalized world-hating hostility I had felt emanating from Rhiannon up until now. This was pointed, vicious, personal, and Rhiannon’s voice shook with it.
“What—what happened?” I asked. “Is this because she abandoned you?”
“Abandoned us?” Rhiannon gave a kind of derisive, hooting laugh. “Fuck no. She didn’t abandon us.”
“Then what?”
“Then what?” she imitated, cruelly mocking my south London accent, blurring her cut-glass consonants, swallowing the final t into an estuary drawl. “She stole my fucking father, if you must know.”
“What?”
“Yes, my dear darling daddy. Shagged him for the best part of two years and had Maddie and Ellie wound round her little finger covering up for them both, telling my mother lies. And do you know what the worst part of it was, I didn’t even realize what was going on until my friend came to stay and pointed it out. I didn’t believe