Free The Last Time I Saw You by Eleanor Moran

thought of her giggling in the kitchen, her salacious stories about him. It must be recent, easy to unpick.
    “That night he cried. That’s when I knew.”
    She must have been hiding it all along, trying her best to fight it off because she knew it was wrong. How lonely she must have been: I berated myself for not barging into her room weeks ago and grabbing our closeness back with both hands. Perhaps it was me who had abandoned her.
    “You poor thing. I’m so sorry.”
    She collapsed on me, put her head in my lap and sobbed for what felt like hours. It was unnerving but also oddly exciting; there was something so unbridled about her. I felt like the scales had balanced, like I had become vital, and it made me brave. I stroked her arm and tentatively spoke.
    “I do get it. At least a bit.” I always felt a tinge of shame back then, a slight sense of wrongness, for reasons so hazy and nonspecific that I could never grab hold of them and beat them into submission.
    “How come?” she said, rolling onto her back and looking up at me through those mascara-laden lashes. Sally always wore layer upon layer of the stuff, the blackest she could find.
    “He’s called James,” I started, gaining confidence as I took in her rapt expression. I told her all of it; how long I’d loved him, how I’d waited for him, and now, how I’d finally givenup the wait. Tears came as I described it, and now it was her turn to comfort me. It was the closest I’d ever felt to anyone, that sense of wrongness vanquished by the fact that I could pour out all my secrets and she could simply hear them without flinching. They were schoolgirl secrets, I see that now, but back then they were the map of me, and I guarded them fiercely. She must have known how it made me feel, because she transformed herself, her teasing insouciance replaced by a quiet intensity that banished all the questions and doubts of the weeks just passed. I was hers now, my trust and devotion absolute.
    If only I’d known then what a precious commodity trust really is—that once it’s broken the scars can take more than a lifetime to heal.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Maybe it’s guilt that propels me over to Jules’s house the next night, a desire to make my claim I was busy retrospectively true. I’ve been worrying about the lie all day, trying to make myself pick up the phone, but a force as strong as gravity seems to pull me back.
    I stand on the doorstep for a full seven minutes stomping from foot to foot, too scared to give the doorbell another push in case I wake four-month-old Nathaniel from his hard-won sleep. Eventually she appears, a glob of pureed carrot stuck in her bangs.
    “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she cries, enveloping me in a hug. “You haven’t been here long, have you?”
    “No,” I lie, a white lie this time, trying to prevent my teeth from chattering in her ear like a pair of maracas. “Here, I brought this,” I say, handing her a bottle of wine.
    “Ooh, thank you!” she says, leading me downstairs to the kitchen. “But don’t let me have more than a glass.”
    The thing is, even with the carrot and the sleep deprivation, my sister looks lovely. There’s an infectious warmth about Jules, an aliveness, that means she’s always seemed prettier than the sum of her parts. Not that her parts aren’t pretty, but she’s got an extra sparkle that comes from somewhere else. She’s four years older than me, and we seem to have sectioned off our parents, with me looking more like Dad’s side and her more like Mom’s. She’s got dirty blond hair with a bit of a curl to it, a small, curvy body and the kind of gappy teeth that look cute rather than like a dental emergency. Boys always fancied her, and in the best possible way—not because they thought she was a femme fatale, but because they couldn’t find a reason not to. She took it in her stride, didn’t let it go to her head, then took herself off the market pretty early, marrying her university