The Sister Surprise Abigail Mann (most difficult books to read TXT) 📖

‘Do you see what I mean?’ I ask, trying not to sound desperate. ‘I may have exaggerated little things here and there, but not to the extent that Duncan did. He ran a bulldozer through everything I wrote.’

Moira looks at me like a cocker spaniel puppy, her head tilted to one side as she weighs up her words.

‘OK, three things. One: you’re right, your boss has made a lot of changes. Two: no one actually says “Och, aye” in Scotland. It’s a common misconception. Three: I like how impressive I sound in your version of the diaries,’ says Moira, ‘Particularly the section that said I had “the core strength of a Californian yoga instructor and the finesse of a matador for the new age of pig vaccination”,’ she says, using a 1950s broadcasting voice. ‘Lastly, can I put that on my CV?’

‘If you use my version, sure. Duncan’s angle is more Hot Fuzz than Line of Duty.’

Moira nods, tucking the duvet more tightly round her leg. ‘He sounds awful to work with.’

‘That’s what’s so weird, he’s actually not. I barely saw him until this whole DNA fiasco started. There’s a lot of people I thought would stoop this low before he did. The man wears tank tops to work every day. How can you lack a perceivable code of ethics and wear hand-knitted bloody tank tops?’

‘People surprise you.’

‘Isn’t that the truth,’ I say, pushing my plate onto the coffee table. I don’t want to give Moira the impression that I’m forcing normalcy on to a completely abnormal situation, so I hang back and let her dictate the pace. She bites her thumbnail, her eyes flicking left and right as though tennis is playing on the ancient box television opposite.

Moira drops her hand and faces me.

‘Why didn’t you send me a message on The Ancestry Project? Right back at the start? That would have been easier than coming all the way up here.’

‘I thought about it. I don’t know, it didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure I’d even find you, but I clearly underestimated quite how small Kilroch is. Besides, Mum has always given me an ambiguous answer as to what she was doing here, so I wanted to find out myself. I only knew that she’d been involved in the occupation of the oil rig when I saw her in a newspaper clipping at the church, then when Ross explained the damage it caused the village, I started to understand why she might have been keen to distance herself from it.’

Moira nods slowly. ‘And you’ve got that to deal with when you go back?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, my mouth tight. ‘Speaking of which, when are you going to talk to Jacqui?’ I ask, running a finger along the plate rim to scoop up the last oily smears of cheese.

‘Today, I guess. The thought makes me feel all weird and squirmy, like there’s a giant slug writhing around in my stomach. If she knew about you and didn’t tell me, I want to know why. Eurgh, it’s horrible. I can’t tell if it’s the coffee or the thought of that conversation that’s making me need a nervous poo.’

‘Welcome to my world,’ I say. ‘I don’t think food has stayed inside me for more than a few hours since I found out about you.’

‘Sorry about that,’ says Moira, wrinkling her nose. ‘This is a lot to face up to. You’ve had a head start.’

I nod. ‘I couldn’t anticipate how that live stream would go. Straight afterwards, I had so many messages from people at work asking me what I was going to do but I couldn’t tell my arse from my elbow. When I came up on the sleeper train, I still hadn’t processed it all. I’d compartmentalised this trip as a work assignment and only the “proper journalists” got to go on those, so I stupidly thought that it was a sign I was progressing in my career. It sounds so lame now. The thing is, when I found you, it felt like everything I valued was at risk, including whether you’d accept me as a sister. I was such a control freak about it – who I was going to tell, when I was going to tell them. I thought I’d be able to manage the consequences, but I was only finding new ways to cut off my feelings.’

Moira pushes her overgrown fringe back, thinking. ‘You see, that’s so alien to me because I can’t help but overshare. I’ll tell anyone anything. I told Old Bert down the docks about my first period and I still don’t think he’s recovered.’

I laugh, tension easing from my knotted shoulders.

‘I wish I could be more like that.’

‘You can be. Look, answer this question and imagine that you’re me. What was it like meeting Dad last night?’

I groan. ‘I don’t want to upset you. He’s your dad, you have a relationship with him.’

‘That’s by-the-by at this point,’ she says, her face sympathetic.

‘OK. I felt completely overwhelmed, mainly because I thought he’d come back to life.’

Moira snorts, but holds her hands up when she catches sight of my face. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she says. ‘It is a tiny bit funny, though.’

‘You kept talking about him in the past tense!’

‘Yeah, because he’s worked offshore for the last ten years. It’s complicated between us. Anyway, we’re not talking about me.’

I compose myself, closing my eyes. ‘I also feel … willingly misled by him. I’m not just angry for me, but Mum too. It’s pretty fucked up he let her assume he was dead. At the very least, if he didn’t want to take on any parental responsibility, he should have owned up to it. It makes me feel like I wasn’t worth the effort.’ Moira bites her lip and nods along, encouraging me. ‘And … disappointed. Then I felt guilty about feeling disappointed by him, because he doesn’t owe me anything and I’ve had a nice life.’

‘You were hardly going to feel indifferent, were you?’ Moira smiles, but I