Jo flinches at the words. “Yes, and I feel shitty about it, Han, but I didn’t know what else to do. I never found the memory card, honestly. Either it’s still there somewhere or it was taken by whoever smashed the phone in the first place.” She meets Hana’s gaze. “I acted stupidly, impulsively, like I always do, but I’d never hurt Bea, Han. You know that.”
“But you’d leave Liam . . .” Hana’s never had a noise inside her brain like this before, this loud buzzing. It’s as if her skull is filled with a teeming mass of tiny, angry flies.
Jo doesn’t reply, just steps toward her, but Hana edges away, onto the grass.
“You left him, Jo,” Hana spits out. The buzzing inside her head is morphing into a strange kind of electric energy. “You left him there, to die.”
She thinks of all of the moments prior to Liam’s accident and after it when Jo could have told her. All the moments on the way to the hospital, the way home, at the funeral. The weeks that came after.
Moment after moment seared upon her brain and Jo has taken them all and she will never remember them without hate again.
But the worst thing that Jo’s stolen from her is the only thing she really has left, the most precious thing of all.
Her memory of Liam.
“You think you can get away with this? Stealing everything from me? Because that’s what you do. Take everything.”
“I don’t know what you mean . . .” Jo can’t look at her and Hana knows why. Jo, more than anyone, knows that it’s a pattern—Jo steals from people, always has. Jo stole her hobbies, her friends, and made them hers. And for a short while, Jo would feel better about herself simply because she’d beaten someone.
“I’ll tell you.” Hana lists them all, coldly, brutally: petty things that only a sister would remember or find important. Hana tells Jo about the barbed comments she always makes, how she took up ice-skating just because Hana did, and how she practiced and practiced until she was better than Hana. How she’d talk over Bea when she did well at something and how she’d try to drop in a sly negative when someone else had something good to say.
The words keep coming. Hana’s hot when she finishes speaking, her skull pounding.
Jo is watching her, silent, but her body language—shoulders sagging, head hanging low—says it all. It’s hit home. Finally something has penetrated the barrier.
“I’m sorry,” she says finally, her voice muffled by tears. “I’m so, so sorry.”
It’s actually the worst thing she can say: Hana wants something meaty in return, something she can toy with and rebut. She doesn’t want Jo’s apologies, because there’s pity in that and that’s the last thing she wants. Pity makes her feel silly and small, and she wants to wipe it off Jo’s face.
Hana doesn’t plan what happens next, and she surprises even herself because she has never been physical—has always been the one to run away from conflict and not toward it. Bea and Jo were more likely to scrap it out, wrestle on the sofa, but never her.
Striding forward, Hana roughly grabs Jo’s wrist. “But I don’t think you are sorry.”
Jo recoils. “Stop, you’re hurting me.” She tries to twist away, mascara now smudged in watery black streaks beneath her eyes.
“No,” Hana replies. The buzzing in her head, the black flies, are taking over. “I want you to say it properly.”
“Please, Han,” Jo pleads, trying to dislodge her hand. “You’re scaring me.”
But it’s as if Hana can’t hear her. Looking at Jo’s face, the fear in her eyes, all Hana can concentrate on is the feeling this is giving her, a heady sense of power.
“Han . . .”
But Hana’s silent.
She squeezes harder on Jo’s wrist, so hard that she can feel the rigid line of bone beneath her sister’s skin.
68
You.”
It’s all that Elin can manage. There’s a strange, slippery feeling beneath her breastbone, an internalized sensation of the rug being pulled from beneath her feet.
“Yes, but she was protecting me, Elin. Being the big sister.” His voice breaks.
Elin tries to collect herself. Don’t judge. You’re in no position to judge. “So what happened?” she says softly. “When she was out there?”
“When we were out there. I was on the island that week too. Farrah’s year group and mine were small, so we went together.”
She frowns. “But the photo I found . . . you weren’t in it.”