Beautiful Broken Things(Beautiful Broken Things #1)(90)

Keeping my forehead up against the glass of the window, I turned my head slightly so I was looking right at her. She smiled at me, the spontaneous, instinctive smile of a friend to a friend. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ I said.





My immediate thought was that she hadn’t changed at all. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a simple ponytail, slightly longer than I remembered but still the whiter shade of blonde that I had come to associate with her. Her eyes still sparkled, her smile still shone.

But after the first happy kick of familiarity, I registered that there was a slight strain in the corners of her mouth when she smiled; that she wasn’t wearing any make-up and her face was pale. Where her hair was pulled back at the sides of her face I could see darker roots that were almost, but not quite, hidden by the rest of the blonde. She was thinner than I remembered, the simple black T-shirt and grey zip-up hoodie she was wearing hanging slightly loose around her. Her neck, for so long framed by her dove necklace, was bare.

As I took all of this in, I could see her eyes searching my face and then dropping to my plastered arm and leg as she ran the same checks on me. We stood in silence for at least a minute, just looking at each other, each of us half smiling in the sudden awkwardness of reunion.

‘Last time I saw you, you had cuts all over your face,’ Suzanne said.

‘Last time I saw you . . .’ I began, then stopped. What was the right way to end that sentence? She looked at me, waiting. For God’s sake. Not even two minutes in and I’d already shoved my foot right into my mouth.

‘It’s OK,’ she said finally, a small smile hovering on her face. ‘I know. Do you want to sit down?’ She gestured to one of the sofas. ‘Can you sit down? With the leg, I mean.’

‘Yeah, it’s fine,’ I said, adjusting my hand on my crutch and then starting towards the sofa. ‘I’m used to it now.’

‘How much longer will it be before you can walk properly again?’ Suzanne asked. She sat down and then pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them close with both arms.

‘The cast will come off my leg in about a month,’ I said, settling myself back against the sofa. ‘And then I’ll have physiotherapy and stuff. But I get the one off my arm next week.’ I smiled. ‘Progress!’

Suzanne rested her chin on her knees. ‘That’s great.’

I waited for her to say more, as she would have done before, but she just smiled a little at me, quiet. I felt a wave of nervous sadness I didn’t quite understand, remembering how she’d lifted the umbrella above her head and danced around on a roof, so dauntless and vibrant and bright. It was like I was remembering a different person entirely. I had never really been able to tell where the front ended and she began. Now that front was gone, and I wasn’t sure exactly who was left.

‘Maybe by the time you come home I’ll be fine,’ I said hopefully. At these words, her expression faltered slightly, so I added, ‘Do you know when that will be?’ She didn’t reply, chewing her lip between her teeth. ‘We should plan something,’ I said, trying to smile. ‘Me being mobile, you coming home.’ She was still silent, so I picked up the bag I’d set on the floor and put it in front of her. ‘Here, I brought you stuff.’

‘Caddy.’ Suzanne opened her mouth, then closed it again slowly. I saw her teeth catch a hold of her tongue. ‘Caddy, I . . .’

There was something in her voice that stopped my breath.

‘This isn’t why I asked you to come here,’ Suzanne said, her voice shaky. She put her hands on the top of the bag without even looking inside it. ‘God, I’m sorry.’ I watched her face crease as she lifted her sleeve to her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Caddy.’

‘Stop it,’ I said, my sudden, all-encompassing anxiety fraying my voice. ‘At least tell me why you need to be sorry before you say it.’

‘I’m not coming home,’ she said. ’I’m not going to come back to Brighton.’ Her eyes were steady on me, the handles of the bag twisted around her fingers. ‘I asked you to come here so I could tell you that. Not for presents, or anything like that. To say . . .’ she hesitated. ‘To say goodbye properly. Obviously I’m going to be here for a while, but even after I leave, I won’t go back to Sarah’s.’

Something had stuck in my throat. I tried to swallow. ‘Why not?’

‘I’m going to go into foster care,’ she said carefully, like she was weighing out every word. ‘There are, like, specialist foster carers for teenagers like me, who have been in places like this but don’t have families to go home to.’ She shrugged a little, but I could see the crease of pain on her forehead. ‘There’s a couple in Southampton who are going to take me. I’ve met them. They’re nice.’

‘Southampton?’ I repeated, understanding starting to seep in. Southampton was a two-hour drive from Brighton. ‘But that’s . . . that’s miles away.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘but it’s good. They’ve taken in girls from Gwillim before, so they’ll know what they’re doing with me. Way more than Sarah did anyway. Nuru, one of my key workers, says she thinks they’ll be good for me. They—’

‘But why Southampton?’ I interrupted without thinking, seizing a glimmer of hope. ‘Don’t they have those kinds of foster carers in Brighton?’ I had no idea how this kind of thing worked, but I ploughed on anyway. ‘Even if you don’t live with Sarah any more, you can still come—’