Rainy Day Sisters Read Free Page B

although it’s best not to sleep for more than an hour or two. Otherwise you’ll be completely off schedule.”
    And Juliet was someone who seemed to thrive on schedules. Left to her own devices, Lucy would sleep all day. But now she obediently rose from the table and followed Juliet back into the hall. “I’ll just get my bags from the car. What time is dinner?” Juliet gave her a rather narrow look. “I only meant, with your other—umm, your paying guests? Are they . . . ?”
    â€œI haven’t any guests at the moment,” Juliet answered. “They left this morning, and the next lot arrive tomorrow at noon. They’re all walkers, and they’re usually only here for a night before they move on to the next stop on their route. I don’t do dinner for guests, though, so it’ll just be the two of us.”
    â€œOkay.” Lucy jangled her car keys, the sound seeming too loud in the little hall. “I’m happy to pitch in, of course. With cooking and cleaning and all that.”
    â€œI’ll make a rota,” Juliet answered.
    â€œA rota?” Lucy said blankly, and her half sister pursed her lips.
    â€œA schedule,” she explained, and Lucy suspected she’d already made one.
    â€œGreat.” In the short silence after this awkward exchange, she jangled her keys again, and then went for her bags, ducking her head in the persistent drizzle, giving Hartley-by-the-Sea’s high street one dubious glance. In the rain it all looked gray and bleak, without a single person to liven up the muted, monochrome landscape of terraced houses. If she were to paint it, she’d use a palette of grays and title it
Loneliness
. Or maybe
Isolation
. Not that she was planning on painting anything here, or ever again. Standing there, she couldn’t hear a single sound besides the soft pattering of rain on the hood of her car.
    Ten minutes later Juliet had left her alone in a sunshine yellow room at the back of the house, the white duvet cover stitched with daisies and a single window overlooking the sheep fields.
    Lucy sank onto the bed, feeling more exhausted than ever and quite suddenly homesick—although for whom or what, she didn’t know. She didn’t miss Boston, particularly, or her job as a barista at a gallery/café in Cambridge. She didn’t miss her mother or even Thomas, to whom she’d given three years of her life. She would have missed his children, if they’d shown her even a modicum of kindness or affection, but as it was, she was relieved to be free of them.
    Maybe that was the trouble. She was missing the very fact that she didn’t miss anything, that no one was special to her, that she’d left nothing behind that she still wanted. And nobody would miss her.
    All right, perhaps that was being a bit maudlin. Her best friend, Chloe, hadn’t wanted her to go. She had a small circle of friends and acquaintances who would at least read her Facebook updates, if she could be bothered to post them.
    Arrived in Hartley-by-the-Sea! Raining steadily and had a cup of tea.
    She had friends; she had a sister who she believed loved her even if she wasn’t particularly demonstrative; she had a job. She had her health. Anything else?
    Sighing, Lucy kicked off her shoes and turned back the daisy cover. Sleep, she decided. She had the luxury of sleeping for at least four hours, never mind what Juliet had said about one or two. She’d wake up in time to help with dinner, or with whatever job Juliet had written her down for on her precious rota.

2

    Juliet
    JULIET HAD FINISHED WASHING up the tea mugs, her gaze on the sheep fields that stretched to the horizon, blanketed in a gray drizzle. Upstairs she’d heard the creak of the floorboards as Lucy had moved around, the squeak of the bedsprings. She wondered now what Lucy thought of the room, imagined her taking in the curtains with the daisy chains Juliet