Free Sister: A Novel by Rosamund Lupton Page A

welcomes me by opening her arms, a hug waiting for me to walk into. A few months ago, I would have been repelled. Fortunately, I have become a little less bigot-touchy. We hug tightly and I am grateful for her physicality. I finally stop shivering.
    She looks at me with concern. ‘Are you feeling up to working?’
    ‘I’m fine, really.’
    ‘We watched it on the news. They said the trial would be in the summer?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘When do you reckon I’ll get my computer back?’ she asks, smiling. ‘My writing’s illegible, no one can read their menus.’
    The police took her computer, knowing that you often used it, to see if there was anything on it that could help with their investigation. She does have a truly beautiful smile and it always overwhelms me. She puts her arm around me to escort me inside and I realise she was deliberately waiting for me.

    I do my shift, still feeling nauseous and headachy, but if anyone notices my quietness no one comments. I was always good at mental maths so that side of barmaiding comes easily, but the banter with the customers does not. Fortunately, Bettina can talk for two and I rely on her this evening, as I often used to on you. The customers are all regulars and have the same courtesy towards me as the staff, not asking me questions or commenting on what is happening. Tact is catching.
    By the time I get home it’s late and, physically wrung out by the day, I long to sleep. Fortunately, only three stalwart reporters remain. Maybe they’re freelancers in need of cash. No longer part of a pack, they don’t shout out questions or force lenses in my face. Instead it’s more of a cocktail party type of scenario, where they are at least conscious that I may not want to talk to them.
    ‘Miss Hemming?’
    Yesterday it was ‘Beatrice’ and I resented the false intimacy. (Or ‘Arabella’ from those who’d been too sloppy to do their homework.) The woman reporter continues, at a polite distance. ‘Can I ask you some questions?’ It’s the reporter I heard outside the kitchen window on Sunday evening talking on her mobile.
    ‘Wouldn’t you rather be at home reading bedtime stories?’
    She is visibly startled.
    ‘I was eavesdropping.’
    ‘My son’s with his aunt tonight. And unfortunately I don’t get paid for reading bedtime stories. Is there anything you’d like people to know about your sister?’
    ‘She’d bought her baby finger-paints.’
    I’m not sure what made me say that. Maybe because for the first time you weren’t just living in the present, but planning for the future. Understandably the reporter wants something else. She waits.
    I try to summarise you into a sentence. I think of your qualities but in my head it starts turning into a personal ad: ‘Beautiful, talented, 21-year-old, popular and fun-loving seeks . . .’ I hear you laugh. I left out good sense of humour but in your case that’s entirely true. I think of why people love you. But as I list those reasons I wobble perilously close to an obituary and you’re too young for that. An older male reporter, silent until now, barges in. ‘Is it true she was expelled from school?’
    ‘Yes. She hated rules, especially ridiculous ones.’
    He scribbles and I continue my quest for an encapsulating sentence about you. How many sub-clauses can a single sentence hold?
    ‘Miss Hemming?’
    I meet her eye. ‘She should be here. Now. Alive.’
    My six-word summary of you.

    I go inside the flat, close the door, and hear you telling me that I was too harsh on Dad earlier. You’re right, but I was still so angry with him then. You were too young to take in what Mum and Leo went through when he left, just three months before Leo died. I knew, rationally, that it was the cystic fibrosis that made him leave; made Leo so ill that he couldn’t bear to look at him; made Mum so tense that her heart knotted into a tight little ball that could barely pump the blood around her body let alone beat for anyone