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“Are you saying I don’t?”
“I’m saying that it affected us differently. You were younger, less sure of what was happening, more… forgiving. You cling on to this idea that she was doing what she had to do, that she was making a sacrifice by leaving, I don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t hate her as much as I do,” Amelia pointed out.
“You don’t hate her.”
“I hate what she did.” Amelia took her hand back. “I’m sorry, Jules, but I do. I can’t help it. And I know that you’re dead set on her making predictions for you and that you’re going to get married and all, but to be honest, it was probably just something she said in the heat of the moment, not something she meant.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You didn’t know her as well as I did. She was a scammer, she had granddad’s blood in her. She wouldn’t have hesitated to have told you that the sky was pink if you were paying her for it.”
“I wasn’t paying her for it though, was I?”
Amelia had nothing to say to this. She took Jules’s hand back. “I don’t want to argue with you. We’ve been through this over and over. I just don’t want you to paint yourself into a corner to try and make your life fit with what mum told you, that’s all.”
“I won’t. I’m not.”
“You’re learning to play the piano to impress a woman that you think the fates have decreed will marry you before you turn thirty,” said Amelia, raising an eyebrow.
Jules pulled her hand back and crossed her arms. “What’s wrong with wanting to be with someone?”
“Nothing,” Amelia said. “If that’s what you actually want and you’re not just trying to fulfill some stupid prophecy.”
Jules shook her head. She didn’t want to argue with her sister. She couldn’t argue with her. How was she supposed to tell her that this was something she needed to do, that if there was a chance that their mum would come back and see her happy then she had to take it?
It was stupid, she knew that. In the cold light of day she could see that there was no sense to it at all. But in her heart, it was important. Just as important as it was to Amelia that she made a success of her life.
“Want to watch some Schitt’s Creek?” Amelia said, nudging her.
Jules recognized the olive branch for what it was. “Sure.”
As the TV played she thought about her mother, someone she barely remembered. She thought about Alea, her eyes and her hair and her kind smile. She thought about Amelia and Cass and how they launched themselves into each new project with such enthusiasm.
And she thought about Billie Brooke with her loneliness and her mystery and the big dark eyes that sometimes watched Jules like she was the only person in the world.
Amelia laughed at something on the TV then turned to Jules. “You’re watching this, right?”
Jules grinned. “Of course I am,” she said, before snuggling into her sister’s side and focusing on the screen.
She’d see Billie tomorrow.
There was always tomorrow.
Chapter Seventeen
Billie stood in front of the bedroom mirror and held up first the white shirt, then the black one, then the white again. She sighed and tossed them both on the bed and picked up a blue one instead.
She could see the corner of her Arctic Monkeys poster in the mirror behind her and it always made her stomach tight. She’d put it up one day thinking it made her look more normal, but it had made no difference. She hadn’t been any cooler or more acceptable because she’d put up a poster.
It had made her mother roll her eyes and her father complain about using Blu-tac on the walls though.
She sighed again and dropped the blue shirt in favor of the white one and held it up against herself.
Since she’d moved back she’d been sleeping in her own bedroom. It had honestly never occurred to her that she should take the master bedroom. There were two guest rooms as well, for guests that never, as far as Billie knew, appeared. She could have taken one of those. But no, she was back in the little corner room with the single bed that she’d always had.
