Free The Last Time I Saw You by Eleanor Moran Page A

boyfriend soon after they’d graduated. When she’s not on maternity leave she’s an architect, a partner in a small local practice.
    “Where’s Phil?”
    “Parents’ Night,” she says, pouring the wine. “He’s been practicing different analogies for ‘your son’s a psychopath’ all weekend.”
    Much as I love my brother-in-law, I love it even more when I get Jules to myself. I look around her married-lady kitchen, which always seems so much more grown up than mine. It’s tidy, for starters, with carefully selected fixtures and fittings, as opposed to the dingy MDF that our landlady installed sometime last century. The four years that separates Jules and me sometimes seems more like four decades. Maybe older-sister years are a bit like dog years.
    “Cheers,” I say. There’s a cozy sitting area that Jules designed to open off from the kitchen, and I tuck my feet under my bottom and sink into the soft squidge of the sofa.
    She clinks my glass, then crosses the room to peer inside the stove.
    “I’m afraid everything comes out of a carton and the only vegetable is mash. If you get scurvy, don’t tell Mom. Oh, and she’s popping around at some point. She says she’s forgotten what you look like. And she left her Kindle behind when she was babysitting.”
    It has been nearly a month, it’s true. My visiting rotation somehow always tilts toward Dad, and as I went to an interminable Czech art-house movie with him last Wednesday, I felt I’d done my duty for a couple of weeks.
    Jules sits down next to me, and rubs my arm with long, comforting strokes.
    “So tell me about it properly,” she says.
    “It was . . .”
    And I try and describe it, but it’s so hard to translate the feeling of it into words, the sense of collective fear that permeated it. We’re so unconscious, we humans, until we can’t be anymore: what is global warming if not a cheerful collective middle finger to the truth of our own mortality? I almost don’t want to tell Jules how it felt. She’s an optimist, my sister, and I don’t see why she should have to do battle with this one.
    “He sounds like a lovely bloke,” she says, after I describe William delivering his eulogy.
    I think of him pacing up and down around the back of the house, pulling sharply on that cigarette. He probably is, but “tortured” is the word that shouts the loudest. I tell her about what Lola said, the fragment of his call that I overheard.
    “Can’t stop thinking about it,” I say, dipping my fingers distractedly into the hot wax of the scented candle that is burning. “Though it’s not really even my business.”
    “Well he’s kind of making it your business,” she says. “At least if you see him you might find out what the truth is.” The weird thing is, I feel the opposite—like the closer I get to him, the more elusive it will become. “Christ, I wonder how he . . .” Jules trails off. “Sorry, I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”
    “No you shouldn’t,” I say, sounding sharper than I feel: why is it that even now there’s a part of me that surges up in her defense? “If you saw her little girl . . .”
    “Calm down, Livvy, I’m not saying I’m glad she’s dead. I just—she must’ve been hard to be married to.”
    “Yeah, maybe,” I say, suddenly desperate to change the subject. It’s not just the bare facts of Sally’s death that are obsessing me, it’s also that gap. The gap between the loving, vivacious woman he described, and the woman who seemed to haunt him as he paced obsessively up and down that strip of concrete like a man held prisoner. “Don’t hate me, but I think the chicken kievs might be burning.”
    When we’ve finished them, Jules reaches into a stack of recipe books, and extracts a brown envelope that she’s hidden there.
    “Look at these,” she pulls out a couple of black and white photos, slapping them down on the table, “and tell me, honestly, who my celebrity doppelganger