Beautiful Broken Things(Beautiful Broken Things #1)(34)

‘OK.’ Mum stood up suddenly, one hand raised slightly. ‘Let’s calm down.’

‘You see what I mean?’ Sarah said to her, the worst possible thing she could have said. She seemed to realize it too, and her face faltered for the first time. ‘Oh,’ she said quietly, almost to herself. ‘Oh, this is difficult.’

‘You mean I am,’ Suzanne said tightly. I could hear suppressed tears in her voice. ‘Hard work, right?’

‘I worry about you.’ Sarah’s voice was earnest and frustrated, rising with each word. ‘How can I know, when you’re not in your room, where you are? How can I be sure that this isn’t the time you won’t come home again?’

My mother took a step forward and said ‘Sarah’ in a quick, warning voice, but she wasn’t looking at Sarah, or even Suzanne. She was looking at me with an anxious, frustrated frown on her face.

For a moment, I still didn’t get it. And then I did. Something in my head finally clicked; Samaritans . . . won’t come home again . . . I’m not allowed to be at home by myself . . . Sarah wasn’t worried Suzanne would get hurt. She was worried she’d hurt herself.

‘I will come home again,’ Suzanne said, and then she started to cry, helplessly, right there in the middle of my kitchen. She pressed a hand to her mouth and turned away from us, her shoulders shaking.

If I’d been a better person, I’d have gone to her straight away, but I was frozen in place by confusion and worry. This was the bit I felt most guilty about later. The beat it took for any of us to move to her side that was just a little bit too long. Both Sarah and my mother went to her, finally, while I stood there clumsily and my dad rubbed his forehead with his fingers, shaking his head.

They left together not long after. The fight had gone from Suzanne, and Sarah seemed, finally, remorseful.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Mum asked me.

Maybe I’d have said yes if she hadn’t used her Samaritans voice and face. But she did. And so I didn’t.

I went up to my room and found my phone half-buried under a pile of schoolbooks on my bed. I tapped out a message to Suzanne and sent it.

22.49: I’m sorry. Next time I’ll let you go through the window xxx

22.59: Don’t be sorry. Not your fault x

23.00: Are you OK? x

23.04: No.

23.05: Do you want to talk about it? x

23.09: Never. Really never. Can we never talk about it? Please?

23.10: Talk about what?

23.11: :) Love you x





One week before Christmas, Tarin and her boyfriend split up. I was the only one who seemed surprised.

‘I had thought she was spending less time with him,’ Mum said. The two of us were in the kitchen, wrapping presents for my younger cousins, while Tarin cried on the phone to her friend in the living room.

‘But they were together for two years,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t that count for anything?’

‘They were happy for most of that time,’ Mum said. ‘I think that’s what matters.’

I made a face. ‘It doesn’t seem worth it.’

‘Why not?’ Mum asked. She was smiling. ‘Because it ends?’

‘Well, yeah.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t have Christmas then,’ Mum said seriously. ‘It’ll have to end.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Mum.’

‘My sweet girl.’ Mum leaned over and put an arm around me. ‘This is a good lesson to learn now, when it’s happening to someone else: letting go is just as important as holding on, sometimes. It’s a good thing that Tarin ended this relationship if she wasn’t happy. I’m proud of her.’

‘But she wasted her time,’ I said, frustrated. ‘And now she’s miserable. What was the point if she just had to let go at the end? Isn’t it better to be with someone worth holding on to?’

‘People can spend their whole lives thinking that way,’ Mum said. ‘But people we love come and go, Caddy. That doesn’t mean we loved them any less at the time.’

I tried to talk to Tarin about it, but she refused to talk about Adam, insisting instead that she wanted to spend time with me and Rosie, like we used to do when we were younger.

‘And Suzanne,’ I said.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s three of you now. I keep forgetting.’

Suzanne was uncharacteristically shy around Tarin at first, letting Rosie and me do most of the talking when the four of us went to Nando’s for a Christmas Eve-Eve dinner. It was the night before Suzanne was to go to Reading with Sarah, something she had almost completely avoided talking about, even when it was just the three of us. All I knew was that they’d ‘compromised’ and would be spending their Christmas in a hotel with the rest of Suzanne’s family.

After the food arrived, Tarin moved into big-sister mode. I could almost see it happening.

‘So,’ she said to Suzanne, spreading butter on her corn, ‘how’s everything with you? How long have you been in Brighton now?’

‘Fine,’ Suzanne said, in a way that seemed automatic. ‘Um, about five months.’

‘Are you getting on OK?’

I recognized the instinctive concern in Tarin’s voice, but Suzanne seemed, if anything, confused. ‘Yeah, fine,’ she said.