Rosamund Lupton - Sister

It must have been so much colder for you. Did the snow muffle the sound of the trees? Was it freezing and silent? Did my coat help keep you warm? I hope that as you died you felt me loving you.

There are footsteps outside and the door is opening.

It’s taken hours of dark terror and countless thousands of words, but in the end it reduces down to so little.

I’m sorry.

I love you.

I always will.

Bee

I’m not sure if anyone reads the acknowledgments, but I hope so because without the following people, this novel would never have been written or published.

First, I want to thank my UK editor, the wonderful Emma Beswetherick, for her creativity, insight, and for not only having the courage of her convictions but inspiring other people to share them. I would also like to thank Sarah Knight and Christine Kopprasch at Crown for all their support and for getting this story across the Atlantic!

I would like to thank my agent, Felicity Blunt, at Curtis Brown, as well as Kate Cooper, Nick Marston, and Tally Garner, also at Curtis Brown.

I want to thank, hugely, Livia Firth, Michele Matthews, Kelly Martin, Sandra Leonard, Trixie Rawlinson, Alison Clements, and Amanda Jobbins, who helped in so many practical ways.

Thank you, Cosmo and Joe, for understanding when I needed to write and for being proud.

Last, but most of all, my thanks go to my younger sister, Tora Orde-Powlett—the inspiration for the book and a continued blessing.

I couldn’t move, not even a little finger or a flicker of an eye. I couldn’t open my mouth to scream.

I struggled, as hard as I could , to move the huge hulk that my body had become, but I was trapped under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor and moving was impossible.

My eyelids were welded shut. My eardrums broken. My vocal cords snapped off.

Pitch dark and silent and so heavy in there; a mile of black water above me.

Only one thing for it, I said to myself, thinking of you, and I slipped out of the wrecked ship of my body into the black ocean.

I swam upward toward the daylight with all my strength.

Not a mile deep after all.

Because I was suddenly in a white room, brightly gleaming, smelling pungently of antiseptic. I heard voices and my name.

I saw the body part of “I” was in a hospital bed. I watched a doctor holding my eyelids open and shining a light into my eyes; another was tipping my bed back, another putting an IV into my arm.

You won’t be able to believe this. You’re a man who dams rivers and climbs mountains; a man who knows the laws of nature and physics. “Hogwash!” you’ve said to the TV, when anyone talks about anything paranormal. Although you’ll be kinder to your wife, not consigning my words to be fed to pigs, you’ll think it’s impossible. But out-of-body experiences do happen. You read about it in the papers; hear people talking about it on the radio.

But if this was real, what should I do? Push my way through the doctors and elbow out the nurse who was shaving my head? “Excuse me! Gangway! Sorry! My body, I think. I’m right here, actually!”

Thinking ridiculous things because I was afraid.

Sick, goose bumps, shivering afraid.

And as I felt afraid, I remembered.

Blistering heat and raging flames and suffocating smoke.

The school was on fire.

You were in your important BBC meeting this afternoon, so you wouldn’t have felt the strong, warm breeze—”A godsend for sports day,” parents were saying to each other. I thought that even if a God existed he’d be a little tied up with starving people in Africa or abandoned orphans in Eastern Europe to worry about providing free air-conditioning for Sidley House School’s sack race.

The sun shone on the white lines painted on the grass; the whistles hanging around the teachers’ necks glinted; the children’s hair was shiny-bright. Touchingly too-big feet on small legs bounced on the grass as they did the one-hundred-meter dash, the sack race, the obstacle course. You can’t really see the school from the playing field in summertime; those huge pollarded oaks hide it from view, but I knew a reception class of four-year-olds was still in there, and I thought it was a shame the youngest children couldn’t be out enjoying the afternoon too.

Adam was wearing his “I am 8!” badge from our card this morning—just this morning. He came hurrying up to me, that little face of his beaming, because he was off to get his cake from school right now! Rowena had to get the medals, so she was going with him; Rowena who was at Sidley House with Jenny all those moons ago.

As they left, I looked around to see if Jenny had arrived. I’d thought that after her A-level disaster she should immediately start revision for her retakes, but she still wanted to work at Sidley House to pay for her planned trip to Canada. Strange to think I minded so much.

I’d thought her being a temporary teaching assistant at seventeen was challenge enough—and now she was school nurse for the afternoon. We’d gently crossed swords at breakfast.

“It’s just a little young to have that much responsibility.”

“It’s a primary school sports day, Mum, not a motorway crash.”

But now her shift was almost over—with no accidents at all—and soon she’d be out to join us. I was sure she’d be itching to leave that small, stuffy medical room stuck at the top of the school.

I’d noticed at breakfast that she was wearing that red frou-frou skirt with a skimpy top and I’d told her it didn’t really look very professional, but when did Jenny ever listen to my advice on clothes?

“Just count your lucky stars I’m not in bumsters.”

“You mean the jeans that hang around boys’ bottoms?”

“Yup.”

“I always want to go and give them a hitch up.”

She bursts out laughing .

And her long legs do look rather wonderful under the too-short, gauzy skirt, and despite myself I feel a little proud. Though she got her long legs from you.

On the playing field, Maisie arrived, her blue eyes sparkling, her face one large smile. Some people dismiss her as slightly eccentric in her fun shirts (long sleeves a different pattern to the rest), but most of us love her.

“Gracie,” she said, giving me a hug, “I’ve come to give Rowena a lift home. She texted me a little while ago, said the tubes were up the spout. So Chauffeur Mum to the fore!”

“She’s getting the medals,” I told her. “Adam’s gone with her to get his cake. They should be back any minute.”

She smiled. “What kind of cake this year?”

“A chocolate tray bake. Addie dug out a trench with a teaspoon and we took off all the candy and replaced them with soldiers. It’s a World War One cake. Which is violent but fits with the curriculum, so I don’t think anyone will mind.”

She laughed. “Fantastic.”

“Not really, but he thinks so.”

“Is she your best friend, Mum?” Adam asked me recently .

“Probably, yes,” I said .

Maisie handed me a “little something” for Adam, beautifully wrapped, which I knew would contain a spot-on present. She’s brilliant at presents. It’s one of the many things I love her for. Another is that she ran in the mothers’ race every single year that Rowena was at Sidley House, and she always came in last by a mile but didn’t give a hoot! She has never owned a piece of Lycra clothing and, unlike virtually every other mother at Sidley House, has never been inside a gym.