The Half Sister(46)
There’s just enough light filtering in from outside for Kate to make her way into the living room, avoiding the brutal corners of the coffee table, to sit on the sofa. She opens up Matt’s emails and runs her eyes down the list, waiting for something or someone to jump out. She tells herself she doesn’t know what she’s looking for, except she does. As her eyes dart over anonymous names and meaningless subject headings, she can no longer tell whether her stomach is churning with nausea because she’s pregnant or because she’s doing something she never believed she’d do.
Kate is immediately drawn to the numerous emails from ‘[email protected]’, which prove that she works with Matt. Seeing the evidence that he was telling the truth in black and white is a relief. The content is innocent enough, as they bounce back and forth on news items and feature ideas, but they tell her nothing more of who Jess really is, or where she’s from. Kate’s eyes trail down the list, looking for something more.
She searches for Jess’s name and finds more correspondence under the subject heading of ‘Junior Reporter’. Sent from a personal email address, Kate is taken aback by the image that fills the screen as she clicks on the attached CV, shocked to be face to face with the woman who calls herself her half sister. There’s a familiarity about her dirty blonde shoulder-length hair, wide-set eyes and straight nose, but Kate tries to convince herself that it’s because they’ve already met. She will not allow the resemblance to Lauren to infiltrate her brain.
The covering letter, addressed to Mr Walker, is innocuous enough, with no mention of any supposed connection. As Matt had said, it seems she’d come straight from university in Bournemouth, where she’d studied journalism. Now, Jess says in her letter, I want to work on the country’s top-selling newspaper. Kate groans at the attempted flattery, before forwarding the email onto herself and deleting it from Matt’s sent box.
‘Kate!’
She jumps up, banging her calf into the ‘bastard’ coffee table and biting down on her tongue to stop herself from screaming out.
‘What are you doing?’ asks Matt. She can just make out his silhouette in the doorway.
‘I was just . . .’ she starts, as his phone burns a hole in her hand.
‘Couldn’t you sleep?’
‘I . . . erm . . . no.’ The panic of getting past him to put his phone back onto his bedside table is messing with her ability to talk. ‘I had a headache.’
‘But you’re okay now?’
‘Yes,’ she says, thankful that it’s dark and he can’t see the guilt written all over her face.
‘What time is it?’ he asks. ‘I couldn’t find my phone.’
‘Erm, around midnight I think,’ she mumbles. ‘Here, let me help you.’ She scurries past him into the bedroom and rushes round to his side of the bed.
‘It might help if we put the light on,’ he says, flicking the switch.
Kate instantly falls to her hands and knees.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Matt asks.
No, she’s not okay. Her heart’s thumping through her chest and she feels sick at how he will react if he finds her with his phone. Not because he knows there’s anything incriminating on there, but because she’s breached the trust that they’ve always shared.
‘Here it is!’ she exclaims, far too loudly. ‘You must have knocked it onto the floor.’
‘Oh,’ is all he says, but it’s enough to let her know that he doesn’t believe her.
23
Kate
Kate’s sleep is interspersed with vivid dreams of Matt, Lauren and her mum and dad, each of them vying for screen time in her head. They all float in and out, in various guises – unrecognizable as the humans they are, yet it is still somehow immediately obvious who’s who. The only cast member who looks like her real self is Jess, who is ensconced in the corner of a room, beckoning the family members over, one by one, to whisper to them. When it’s Matt’s turn, she holds his face and kisses him, long and deep, all the while looking at Kate.
When the alarm clock goes off, Kate hits the snooze button, hoping that she’ll be thrown back into the dream for just long enough to see what happens in the end. But Matt’s already moaning beside her and she feels an intense hatred for him, still so hurt by what he’d done in the dream that she’s momentarily unable to separate it from reality.
‘I didn’t get a wink of sleep,’ he says, though Kate knows that’s not strictly true, as she heard him quietly snoring at least three times. ‘It’s so bloody hot – there’s just no air.’
Kate sits up slowly, as if trying to fool her body into thinking she doesn’t feel well. She groans, for effect, as she lets her head fall heavily onto her bent knees.
‘Do you feel rough?’ asks Matt, leaning over to her side of the bed to rub her back.
She goes to speak, but clamps her mouth shut and nods instead.
‘Okay, you need to lie back down,’ says Matt. ‘Slowly.’ He supports her as she lowers herself back onto the mattress. ‘I’ll go and get a bucket.’
As Kate closes her eyes, a replay of her dream flickers on the inside of her eyelids, the image of Matt and Jess branding itself on her memory. She hopes, like most dreams, that it will have all but eradicated itself by lunchtime.