Beautiful Broken Things(Beautiful Broken Things #1)(46)

‘It wasn’t up to her,’ Suzanne said. ‘All she could really do was talk to my mum and try and get her to do something. But Mum, she’s not . . .’ She stopped herself, paused, then tried again. ‘She’s not very strong. I mean, emotionally. She couldn’t . . . She couldn’t have taken care of us by herself, without my dad. And she really loves him. So it was never really an option.’

I wondered who had told her all of this, who had made her believe it was true.

‘My mum used to say –’ Suzanne stopped herself abruptly, clamping her mouth shut.

‘Say what?’ I prompted finally.

‘You’ll think she’s awful.’

‘Suze, I already kind of think that.’

A look of distress passed over Suzanne’s face. ‘I shouldn’t have said any of this. I’m not meant to.’

I sat next to her, the cold of the stone seeping through my joggers. ‘Says who?’ I said carefully. ‘There’s only me here, and the only person I care about in any of this is you. And I want to hear it, if you want to talk about it. But if you don’t, that’s fine too.’ I was almost disappointed that it really was only me and her there; I so rarely said the right thing at the right moment that it would have been nice if there had been someone else there to witness it.

‘She used to say I was the strongest one,’ Suzanne said slowly. ‘That I was much stronger than her. That . . . well, that I could take it, basically.’

For a moment I couldn’t speak. ‘Wow. Wow, OK.’

‘See, it sounds bad.’ Suzanne’s voice had quickened. ‘But she meant it in a good way.’

When I’d heard ‘abuse’, that very first time I’d found out the truth about Suzanne’s past, I’d thought of violence as being something simple. Awful, but simple. A violent man and a child who bore the brunt of it. I hadn’t even considered the framework that supported it, allowed it to happen in the first place. The blind eyes turned, the excuses made, the insidious lies whispered into the ear of a child so desperate for love they mistook a gentle tone for truth.

Could I say that to her? Would that make me a good friend or a terrible one?

‘Did you ever tell anyone?’ I asked instead.

‘No, I did everything I could to make sure no one knew.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t want them to take me away,’ Suzanne said. She wasn’t looking at me, still rolling the unlit cigarette between her fingers. ‘I know you won’t understand. But they’re my family. I love them. I just wanted them to love me back, that’s all.’ Her voice caught on ‘back’, but she gathered herself. ‘I didn’t want to be taken away. I didn’t want that to be my life. I’d rather die than go into care.’

There were more things I wanted to say. I wanted to ask her why, if she was so against being taken into care, she wasn’t trying harder with Sarah. Didn’t it make more sense to try to be good? I wanted to know more about the family she’d left behind; where her beloved brother was during all of this; whether her old friends knew anything about what had been going on. But before I could voice any of it, she turned to me with a startling, full-bodied grin.

‘OK! I’ve told you lots of really awful stuff it kills me to talk about. I’m done now.’ She leaped up off the wall. ‘What breed of dog do you think makes the cutest puppies? I think it’s Newfoundlands. The puppies are like bear cubs. So cute! And they call them Newfies.’

‘You can’t beat a Labrador puppy,’ I said, sliding off the wall and linking my arm through hers. We began walking away from the seafront, towards home. ‘They’re, like, classic puppy.’

‘True,’ Suzanne said lightly. She squeezed my elbow as we walked. ‘German shepherds though. Oh my God.’

She kept this up all the way home and until she waved goodbye – ‘Buonanotte!’ – and sauntered off down my street. It wasn’t until the following morning – when I woke up dog-tired and achy – that I checked my phone to see that she’d sent me a text at 4.38 a.m., saying simply, ‘Please don’t tell Roz anything I told you’. The starkness of the words, so unlike her, jolted me properly awake. A second text had come through half an hour later: ‘Thanks for listening. Sorry to offload on you. Next time will be more fun :) xx’

For the first time I felt a pang of unease. Had she even slept at all? I hesitated, then tapped out a reply. ‘Offload any time. You did get some sleep, right? xx’

I was washed, dressed and halfway to school before she replied. ‘Yep, just woke up. Too late for school OH WELL. Want to skip school with me? Sarah’s at work. Netflix all day and ME! Say yes xx’

I was smiling, safe in my mother’s car, the collar of my school blazer rigid against my neck. ‘Private-school girls don’t skip. Be good! x’

‘What are you grinning at?’ Mum asked. The Esther’s school gates loomed in the distance.

‘Nothing,’ I said, reaching for my school bag and pushing my phone into my pocket. I leaned over and kissed her cheek. ‘See you later!’

Later that week I met Rosie and Suzanne after school in Starbucks. The two of them were deep in an animated conversation when I arrived and I hesitated at the top of the stairs, looking at them. Both in school uniform and sipping from identical Frappuccino cups, they looked like a matched set.