Letting You Go Read Free Page B

balance.
    ‘I’m sure there are more riveting topics you and Alex can talk about besides Carrie Logan, Jem, surely? Can’t you gossip about men, or diets or something … like normal sisters?’
    It had occurred to Alex years ago that she and Jem were not
normal sisters
, not if swapping juicy titbits about boyfriends and diets was the standard. Alex still wasn’t wholly sure whether she should feel more or less sad about that. It wasn’t love or affection she and Jem were missing, but years. Those intense teenage years where experiences and emotions were heightened and giddy and sisters confided and shared. Alex had left for uni and overnight it was as if something seismic had shifted leaving Alex on one side of a gaping chasm and Jem on the other. Not just their age gap. Alex could feel something else there stuck between them, something more than five big teenage years. Whatever it was, Alex had never poked at it, in case it turned out she was responsible for that too.
    The phone had fallen silent. Something furtive seemed to be going on at the other end. ‘OK, OK,’ Jem whispered. She feigned an over-excited tone. ‘So guess who we saw? At the church?’
    Alex ran through the usual suspects. Blythe had already told her how Susannah and Helen had each left flowers forDill this morning, but other than Blythe’s old choir-buddies and the Reverend no-one else sprang to mind. ‘I give up. Who did you see?’
    Jem laughed then. An odd, pre-cursory chortle. ‘Guess.’ But Alex didn’t have time to guess, Jem couldn’t hold it in. ‘Only
Finn.’
    Alex felt her thoughts slow down, sinking to the bottom of her brain like globules of wax in a lava lamp – heavy, vivid, helpless colour.
    Finn.
She’d been pressing that name to the back of her mind all day and Jem had just let it loose. Thoughts of Dill nearly always came piggy-backed by thoughts of Finn. Bound together by time and circumstance.
    Jem was riding out the pause. All of a sudden, she could wait all day. Alex made a grab for something coherent. ‘Finn? But …’ she managed.
    ‘I know, right?’
    ‘Finn’s back in the Falls? But … I thought …’
    ‘I
know.
The rover’s returned and, by the looks of things, he’s all done with the intrepid explorer bit.’
    Alex could feel a warm uncomfortable sensation brewing over the back of her neck. Jem would test her this way, now and again. She’d poke Alex like a bruise just to gauge if she was still tender, and all Alex could do was do her best not to flinch. It was like being ambushed. Stupid really, that she would be ambushed by this of all news. Eilidh Falls was his home, after all, of course he wasn’t going to stay away
forever.
    Alex held the phone, waiting to hear the next nuggets of Jem’s reconnaissance back home to filter down the line. Surprise began to twist into resignation. Finn had gone back to settle down, with a wife probably. And a family.
Children.
Beautiful children, sharing his glorious scruffy hair and playful eyes. He could’ve met a thousand women as he’d backpacked and odd-jobbed his way around the planet, exotic and captivating like the places he’d daubed on his bedroom wall. His ‘Great Adventure List!’
Their
list.
    Alex waited for news of the impossibly beautiful wife and their impossibly beautiful offspring to sock her one through the earpiece. Blythe had gone quiet in the background. She’d have been pleased for sure to bump into him, Alex knew it. Her mum’s fondness for Finn had never waned. Blythe had never blamed Finn.
    ‘Mum turned into a bashful teenager when she saw him, didn’t you, Ma? She thinks he’s even more handsome with a bit of colour on him.’
    ‘I was not bashful, Jem. I just think it’s a shame that boy hasn’t been snapped up. He should be bouncing a small child around on those lovely broad shoulders of his by now. “Too busy for love”? How can anyone ever be
too busy for love
?’
    No wife. No impossibly beautiful children.