Free The Other Family by Joanna Trollope Page A

where instructed, her hand moving across and across on Tamsin’s head.
    ‘But that is all,’ Mark Leverton said. ‘That’s the only difference. There are no complications, I’m delighted to say, and no inheritance tax is applicable, because a will was made and you are Mr Rossiter’s widow.’
    Chrissie withdrew her gaze very slowly from the sheet of paper and transferred it, equally slowly, to Mark’s face. She stopped stroking.
    She said, quite clearly, but from a long way away, as if waking from some kind of trance, ‘But I’m not.’
    The clock beside Amy’s bed said, in oblong green digits, two forty-five a.m. Last time she had looked it had said one thirteen, and the time before that twelve thirty-seven, and in between those times, she had tried to read and tried to sleep and tried to talk to friends online and tried to play her flute and tried to want to go downstairs and make toast or hot chocolate. She had tried, and she had comprehensively failed. She had been in her room since just before eleven, and had been able to do nothing but agitate about in it since then, fiddling and fidgeting and feeling her mind skid away from yet more information it had no wish to acknowledge, let alone absorb. Who on earth, actually, could possibly have a mind that did not react violently to being told, in the space of fifteen minutes, that your father had left two crucial elements of his life and being to the family that precededyours, that your parents had never, actually, got around to being married, and that your sisters had somehow known this all along, but had carelessly – or deliberately – omitted to include you in this knowledge?
    ‘Oh,
Amy
,’ Tamsin had said, in the exasperated tone of one forced to indulge the deliberate babyishness of a younger sibling, ‘you
knew
. Of course you knew.’
    ‘I didn’t—’
    ‘Well,’ Dilly said, ‘I can’t think how you didn’t know. It wasn’t exactly a secret. What were you
doing
, not knowing?’
    Amy glared at her.
    ‘You tell me.’
    ‘They were together for twenty-three years,’ Tamsin said. ‘Twenty-five, if you count from when they met. He was only married once – before, for twenty-two years. He was with Mum for longer.’
    ‘How do you know?’ Amy said stubbornly.
    ‘Mum told me.’
    ‘Why didn’t she tell
me
?’
    ‘I expect,’ Dilly said, ‘you didn’t ask her.’
    ‘Ask her now,’ Tamsin said. ‘Go on. Ask her.’
    But Amy hadn’t. In the turmoil of the evening, with supper hardly happening, and Robbie and Craig appearing and then disappearing, with Chrissie sitting silently on the piano stool in front of the closed piano – Amy didn’t think she’d ever seen it closed before – and nobody, for some reason, telephoning, there hadn’t been a moment when Amy, despite the turbulence of her feelings, could ask her mother a question. Well, not a question of that kind, anyway, not a question that inevitably led to so many other questions, none of them comfortable. But not asking the questions had left her mind and her stomach churning, and was propelling her in and out of her bed and round and round her bedroomas if driven by some arcane disorder that would not let her rest.
    She looked at the clock again. Two forty-eight. She got out of bed for the fiftieth time, pulled on an old cardigan of her father’s that she had appropriated from his cupboard in the week after his death, and opened her bedroom door. Across the tiny landing, with its sloping ceiling and ingenious Swedish skylight, Dilly’s bedroom door was closed. Amy had heard her come upstairs, about midnight, still murmuring into her phone, and shut the door in the definitive way that indicated she would not be accommodating about being disturbed. Often, and especially if she had had a bad day at the college where she was training to be a beauty therapist, she left her door just open enough to indicate that even Amy’s company was preferable, just now, to her own. But last