Free The Innocents by Francesca Segal

with them when your dad went to America.” She was right, of course. For most people who knew of her, the spectacular brutality of her mother’s death was her defining characteristic. She could not escape it.
    “Oh, and Rachel would really have loved that. I was enough of a pain in the ass being the charity-case first cousin without being foisted on her as a pseudosister. That would have gone down very, very badly, I suspect.”
    “Is that entirely fair?”
    He tried to ask this carefully, as her hostility had surprised him. The way Rachel told the story, she had been in as much torment as her parents—they had all desperately wanted Ellie to move in with them but had not felt able to suggest that she be separated from Boaz. Whatever he was, after all, he was her father. Had it been up to Rachel, Adam had always believed, the Gilberts would have taken the little girl in a heartbeat.
    “Which bit? Oh, I’m sure they’d have said I could move in with them if I’d begged. I do remember a few whispers about it, yes. But it was all crap. Rach didn’t exactly push for me to live with them. I’m sure that’s why Jaffa and Lawrence didn’t ever even bring it up with Boaz, I don’t think, in the end. But in any case, my inclination didn’t really come into it.”
    “Why?”
    “Oh, Boaz was pretty formidable then. The more irrational he’s being the more determined he is and anyway, he never asked me. He needed someone to take care of him.”
    “But who was taking care of you?”
    “To stop me making all those mistakes, you mean?”
    He smiled. “Or not mistakes then, if you say so. Choices.”
    “You’re mocking, but I do say so. That’s exactly what I’d have said. Those ‘mistakes’ you cataloged—the film, whatever else I’ve done that you secretly disapprove of—I chose to do those things. No regrets.”
    “I still think you deserve someone to take care of you,” he said, after a moment.
    “You know the one thing I can’t stand?” she said suddenly, and he realized with horror that—out of nowhere—she had tears in her eyes. “I can’t stand the fact that everyone expects me to pretend all the time. Now that I’m here Jaffa is really trying, and Lawrence is—well, you know, he’s such a good man. He’s Lawrence. And they’re relieved I’m here, I know that, and they want to be allowed to make up for all these things that they feel guilty about, but everyone here wants me to leave everything behind and pretend to be something I’m not and abandon my whole life, or at the very least conceal my whole life, which is just so fucking lonely.”
    She did not bury her face in her hands as Rachel might have done, or collapse into emotional submission that might have permitted him to lean over and hold her. She did not even look at him. She sat rigid just as she had before, but for a single, mascara-gray tear that painted a faint track down her cheek. “You know, they’re all so worried about me all the time. I know that when they look at me they feel this … pity .” She spat the word. Her BlackBerry began to ring, a cheery calypso tinkling, and she silenced it. “And there’s all this guilt for the years that they feel they missed. But they did miss them, for whatever reasons, and they either want me to be perfect like Rachel or expect me to be broken and helpless in a way that would be more … palatable, I guess, or sympathetic. I’m not allowed another option. The idea that I don’t want to collapse and weep about it, that I might want to live … I know that sounds melodramatic but you have to live, because people just disappear. They’re there, and then they disappear. Gone. And you can never touch them again. I can never tell her anything again. You know?”
    Adam nodded.
    “You know …” She began to comb her fingers slowly through her hair, separating loose tangles that were now almost dry. “I might not live the way that my family want and God knows I’m not Rachel. But