green. He was surprised and I think confused that it was me who’d been at the hospital instead of him. He asked how Dad was.
Julius: It was a surprise to see Emma that morning.
She’s never been a girly girl – and I’m not saying that she should be, or anything like that. I’m a feminist, you know. I love women.
But there was something a bit… dishevelled about her that morning. Like she’d slept on the floor, or something like that. I don’t think she’d been into the main hotel since that night she babysat the girls, plus she’d skipped dinner the night before. I didn’t know if we’d fallen out, or if we were getting on. It’s always difficult to tell with her.
Emma: Did he really use the word ‘dishevelled’? I don’t remember what I was wearing. I suppose Mum rushed me up that morning. Does it matter? Why would it matter?
Julius: You have to understand that was the starting point. My scruffy sister was unexpectedly knocking on my door.
Emma: Julius was acting a bit strangely. It’s hard to tell you exactly why, other than that he kept looking past me along the corridor. He said something like the girls would be happy Dad was coming back. It made me realise that I should’ve spent more time with them since that night I babysat. We’d had those few minutes on the cliff edge, but that was unexpected and I hadn’t gone out of my way to plan anything with them.
I regret that. I was wrong.
Julius: I tried to help Emma. I asked her to babysit because I wanted her to rebuild her relationship with Amy and Chloe. Then what happened? She looked after them for one night and essentially ignored them the rest of the holiday. Don’t ever let her tell you that the family isolated her: she isolated herself.
Emma: Julius asked if Dad had said anything about what happened on the cliff. It was a fair question, considering it was more or less the first thing I’d asked Dad.
I told him that Dad didn’t know what had gone on. I probably could have left it there – but… I didn’t.
Julius: I saw it in her eyes: conspiracy time.
Emma: I told him that I’d found Daniel in my cottage the day before. Julius reeled a little at that and asked why.
Julius: Emma said she’d found something of Dad’s and that Daniel wanted it.
It sounded, well… mad, I suppose. Such an odd thing to say. I asked what she’d found and she said: ‘I’m not sure I should say.’
Emma: I didn’t know if I could trust him. It was only the day before that I found out he’d lost his job and had been lying about it.
Julius: She ended up saying: ‘It’s just something Daniel wants,’ as if this was perfectly normal. She’d basically told me she’d stolen something from Dad – and that Daniel wanted it back. What did she expect me to say?
Emma: When it’s put like that, I realise it doesn’t sound great. All I can say is that it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. I knew lots of little bits of information that nobody else seemed to know and I made the best decisions I could in the moment.
It’s easy to say I was wrong when you can look back on things – but you could make that observation about all sorts of choices. There’s a whole scientific theory about it, called hindsight bias. Say you go into a lake to save a drowning dog. If you drown yourself, it was a terrible idea. If you save the dog and get back to shore, then you’re a hero. It’s the same decision, but it’s viewed through the outcome.
You can say I made the wrong decisions – but what if things had gone differently in those final twenty-four hours?
Julius: …
Really? Dogs in lakes? Is that the best she has…?
Emma: Julius said he was glad we were talking again. I said something like: ‘Did we ever stop?’
Julius: She’s my sister and there was a double punishment in losing her son and then going to prison. I’m not a monster. I wanted her to be an aunt to Amy and Chloe. Our estrangement, if you want to call it that, was pretty much enforced because she was behind bars.
Emma: I told him that he could have visited me at any time. He said he didn’t want to take up any of my visit times when other people could have seen