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“I know, but…” Surely she would haveasked. She must have texted Harriet on results day. Been involved, at least that much. “Did I text you?” she asked abruptly. “When you got your results?”
“Yes, you asked how I did, and I didn’t reply, and you didn’t follow it up. When you came home a week later, I just told you I’d decided not to go, because, well, I suppose I had.”
“Yes…” Vaguely Rachel recalled a conversation, Harriet shutting it down after she’d asked. She supposed she should have pressed, dug deeper into it all, but she hadn’t. She’d left for her second year of uni a few days later with a sigh of relief.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I should have known about that.”
Harriet shrugged. “I didn’t tell you when you asked.”
“Yes, but…” She’d known something was off. She could have asked. “Why didn’t you take them?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know, really.” Harriet glanced down, tucking her chin low. “I meant to. At least I think I did. But it was a tough time, after Mum left. Maybe it shouldn’t have been—I don’t know. If I’d been you, I’m sure I would have got on with it all much better. But I didn’t.” She drew a breath, squared her shoulders. “And I’d failed my mocks in February—couldn’t concentrate at all then. My teachers were telling me I’d really have to get my head down and work hard, and I wasn’t, Icouldn’t. I started having anxiety attacks, and when it came to the day of the first exam…I just couldn’t face it. At all. I realised I’d rather not take them at all than fail them, and so I didn’t show up. And after I didn’t show up for the first, it was easier not to show up for the second and then the third.” She blew out a breath. “I’m not sure I really wanted to go to university, anyway. I always found the prospect pretty terrifying, to be honest.”
“Why did I not know any of this?” Rachel asked, knowing the question was directed as much at herself as at Harriet. How could she have not known something so big, so fundamental? Had she already been that disengaged, just months after their mum had walked out? She’d come back for Easter, she remembered, but she’d bustled around the house, making meals and doing laundry and, she suspected, feeling put upon.
“I tried to tell you, a little bit.” When she’d begged her to stay, Rachel thought, or later? Had there even been a later? She couldn’t remember now, if Harriet had texted her, if she’d called. It was all a blur—university, coming home, moving on. “But I didn’t go into it,” Harriet conceded, “because I knew what you’d say. ‘Just get on with it, Hats. Uni is brilliant. Just a few more months at home and then you’ll be free.’” It was, Rachel knew,exactlywhat she would have said. “I know you might have meant well,” her sister finished, “but frankly that wasn’t going to help me at all.”
Rachel felt winded, like she’d been sucker-punched. She’d always known, on some fundamental level, that her sister had struggled back then, more than either of them, it seemed, had ever wanted to acknowledge.
Rachel glanced down at the table, trying to sort through her jumbled feelings. She’d told Harriet that she’d come home because maybe then she’d stop blaming her for everything, but right now Rachel felt as if maybe her sister hadn’t blamed her enough.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last, because those felt like the only words she had to offer. “I’d tell you I wish I’d known all that, and I do,now, but I’m not sure I wanted to, back then, if I’m completely honest.” She made herself look up at Harriet, who was gazing back at her, her expression weary and resigned, but at least not overtly hostile.
“No, I don’t think you did,” she agreed. “And that is actually something I don’t blame you for. Anymore, that is. I definitely did, though, back in the day. I was pretty angry with you.”
But she wasn’t still? Rachel wondered. Because Harriet had certainly seemed angry with her recently. She wasn’t going to press the point, though. They were both silent, lost in their thoughts, and for once the mood didn’t feel fraught with tension. Rachel knew this was only the beginning, the first conversation of what she hoped would be many more. She still didn’t know why Harriet had been crying, or why she hadn’t left in the twelve years since she hadn’t taken her A levels, but those questions and answers could wait, for now. They’d taken steps together here today, steps she was very glad of. She thought of Danielle saying how she’d wondered what sort of person she might have become if she’d done things differently, and Rachel thought that right now, at last, she was starting to answer that question about herself.
Chapter Eleven
Aweek afterher conversation with Harriet, the letter for her dad’s MRI appointment came through the letterbox, fluttering onto the floor. Rachel picked it up and opened it before taking it into the kitchen where Harriet was baking a batch of cookies for another party, this one an eighteenth birthday.
“Dad’s appointment,” she said briefly, putting the letter on the table. “His MRI is a week from Thursday.”
“That’s quite soon, really,” Harriet remarked. She dusted her hands on her apron before picking up the letter and studying it.
They were both silent, absorbing the fact of the appointment, its necessity. Over the last week they’d managed to find an even keel, a careful balance. Rachel didn’t press too much, and Harriet didn’t fly at her. They’d worked out a schedule for shopping and cooking, with Rachel pulling her weight as much as Harriet was. It was working, Rachel thought, for the most part. No, they hadn’t yet bonded over manicures and mocktails or shared a tub of ice cream during a Netflix marathon, but maybe those things would come in time. Although maybe they wouldn’t; Rachel hadn’t exactly been a mocktail-and-manicure type girl before now, so why she would be with her sister, she wasn’t sure. But still, baby steps. Their relationship had made some progress, and hopefully it would continue to do so.
And yet…Harriet put the letter back on the table and they both stared at it. The reality of what it meant felt like a weight pressing down on Rachel. She could pretend she’d come back to right old wrongs, to get close to her sister, be a family again—but the hard fact of the matter was she’d come back because there was something wrong with her dad, and the evidence was right here on the table, not to mention in the events of the last week she’d tried both to handle and ignore—her father’s debilitating headache one afternoon, when he’d had to lie down in a dark room; the time at supper when he’d forgotten the word for salt. The way he walked now, so stiff-legged, holding on to things sometimes, as if afraid he might topple over.
Something was really wrong, Rachel knew, and they needed to find out what it was. As for when they did, what would happen then, well…that was a problem for another day.
“Should we both go?” Harriet asked. “Or do you think he won’t want to make a big deal of it?”
“An MRI is kind of a big deal, though.” Rachel shook her head. “I don’t know. I think he’s forgotten about it, actually. He left the memory clinic convinced there wasn’t anything really wrong with him, just because he knew how to tell the time and who the reigning monarch was.”
“But there obviously is,” Harriet replied quietly, and Rachel nodded.
“Yes, there is.”
Again, they fell silent, absorbing what this meant—even if Rachel didn’t think they could know what it would mean, not fully, until they had a diagnosis, and neither of them seemed willing or brave enough to truly consider what that might be, although vague possibilities swirled in her brain. Would Harriet stay in the house, if…
No, she didn’t even want to think about it. Her dad might not have been the cuddliest father on the planet, but he was still herdad. As frustrated as she’d been by his remoteness over the years, she didn’t want to lose him completely. Or lose this house, the only place she’d ever really called home, even if she’d hardly ever come back…which reminded her of that letter from the bank she’d seen, when she’d first arrived.
“Harriet,” she asked suddenly, “when I was moving the boxes from my room, I saw something from the bank about a mortgage. Do you know anything about it?”
“Dad got a mortgage on the house,” Harriet replied with a shrug.
“A mortgage?” Rachel couldn’t hide her surprise. “Why?”
