with them, but she was struggling so hard not to scream “Is it true?” at Max, that it was in everybody’s best interests if she disappeared. She didn’t seem able to shake off the tension that was gripping her, and was terrified of what Max might answer if she asked him a direct question. It hadn’t been a real row earlier, but Ellie got the feeling that Max didn’t want anything that was hers. His moral code would never allow him to use any of her inheritance to buy a new car if he was about to leave her.
‘Did you get the gist of that, Leo?’ she asked as they climbed into her car, knowing her sister would only have seen the superficial problem and not the deeper implications.
‘Couldn’t help it really. He doesn’t want to spend any of that money on himself.’
‘The thing is,’ she said to Leo, looking over her shoulder as she reversed the car, ‘he wants to make sure that we use ‘our’ money, that’s the money we both earn, to pay all the bills. We don’t have a mortgage now, but the running costs of the house are pretty high so the two things sort of cancel each other out. He reluctantly went along with the move, because he could see it was something that I genuinely wanted to do - although like you he thinks my reasoning is madness. But that’s it. We can’t change our lifestyle at all, and we have a budget for shopping every week, same as before.’
‘So what are you going to do, because you can’t carry on arguing about it, can you?’ Leo asked, not unreasonably.
Ellie slammed the car into drive, and turned left out of the gates.
‘I’ve transferred the money into his name. I’ve put him in sole charge of all of our finances. I thought that by doing that, I would make him feel that he was the head of the household, which seems to be his bugbear. But he won’t spend it unless he’s earned it. He thinks it’s my money and he won’t touch it. And you won’t have any of it, so we’ve got all this money just sitting in the bank! You’re the bloody life coach. You tell me what to do,’ Ellie said in despair.
‘It’s not like that Ellie. I don’t tell people what to do.’
Ellie glanced sideways at her sister with concern.
‘I hope Fiona didn’t get to you last night. I thought she was bloody offensive, and I was dying to jump in and give her hell. But I knew you’d hate it.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about Fiona. I’d have preferred it not to be so public, that’s all. I know my job sounds like a bit of a non-profession, but I really do help women, believe it or not. I help them to have the strength to be themselves, rejoice in their individuality, and chase their dreams. We all have issues, Ellie. Every single one of us. But I don’t think constantly striving to fix them is necessarily helpful.’
Ellie felt her throat tighten and her eyes burn. She focused hard on the road ahead. How little she sometimes understood her sister. She and Max were always telling Leo it was time to change – to be more tactile, more open to relationships, to put her past behind her. That was so wrong of them. Leo clearly accepted who she was, and lived with the scars of her early life in her own way.
They travelled in silence for a few minutes, then Ellie slowed the car to a crawl and glanced out of the window. They were going down the back road, and they were passing some police incident tape that she assumed marked the spot where Abbie had been knocked over. A few bunches of flowers were lying on the grass verge.
‘Do you mind if we stop for a minute?’ Ellie asked. ‘It’s just that having spent all those hours with Abbie yesterday, I would like to sort of pay my respects, if that makes sense.’
Leo seemed happy to get out of the car with her sister. They stood silently by the side of the road for a few minutes, and Ellie wondered what could have driven a young girl to be out here, in the middle of nowhere, at that time of night.
She looked at the woods and she couldn’t help remembering the past, when she wasn’t much older than Abbie. It wasn’t the first time in her life that