Victoria Fox - The Santiago Sisters

So why was there this glaring hole in the centre of her heart?

‘You’re Tess Geddes now,’ Simone said. ‘My daughter.’

All night—that long, lonely night—the stranger’s name floated in her half-consciousness like a phantom, daring her to step into it, to let it swallow her up.

To hell with you both, she thought. I don’t need you.

I’ll show you just what I’m made of—and then you’ll be sorry.

‘Looking great, everyone. And … action!’

Simone, or rather her character Miranda Fenchurch, stepped out of the Royal Courts of Justice in a navy pinstripe suit, faced the wall of cameras, and delivered the gut-wrenching oration that would conclude the most anticipated political thriller of the year. As with all Simone’s scenes, they canned it in one.

‘You’re a special lady, you know that?’ the director told her afterwards, as the first spots of rain began to fall and an assistant ushered her under cover.

‘Don’t patronise me, Greg.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’

‘What a dreadful sycophant that man is,’ Simone muttered to her aide, once the director had skulked off. ‘Calling me a lady—who does he think he’s talking to, Camilla Parker Bowles? God forbid.’ Privately, however, Simone knew that she was special. Playing Miranda Fenchurch in An Eye For An Eye was a departure from her usual: she was embodying a cutthroat, hard-nosed barrister who wasn’t afraid to rattle the cage. The awards cabinet at home had better make way for a shiny new addition.

On the way to her car, a female co-star flagged her down. ‘It was wonderful meeting Tess at the party,’ the woman said. ‘What a beautiful girl.’

‘Isn’t she?’

‘When will you be announcing the adoption?’

‘When the time is right,’ Simone replied. ‘It’s a complex process, you understand.’ She could picture the headlines already: SELFLESS SIMONE RESCUES TEEN FROM POVERTY. GEDDES GIVES GIRL A CHANCE. Any star could traipse halfway across the world to buy a baby, but there was something unusual and intriguing about Simone’s decision to make that difference for an older child.

The media would lap it up like piglets at a watering hole.

‘It must be,’ said the woman. ‘Is she finding it hard to adjust?’

Simone thought: None of your damn business. But she felt compelled to say, ‘Not a bit. She loves it here. She loves her new life. She loves me.’

With that, she climbed into the Mercedes and shut the door.

The mansion was quiet, which meant no Emily. So much for Brian’s pledge to ground her. She found her husband in his office. ‘Where’s Tess?’

Brian turned in his chair. ‘Still in her room,’ he replied.

‘No change?’

‘No change.’ Brian got up. He looped his arms around Simone’s waist and she did her best not to wince. She could feel Brian’s gut pressed up against her gym-toned stomach, and endeavoured to focus instead on the wall-mounted shots of him mixing with the power set. That was what had drawn her to him in the early days—how was she to know that underneath the façade lurked an overweight spineless doormat? No wonder Brian’s first wife had left him for a woman. If it weren’t for Brian’s bi-weekly ruts she would begin to doubt if he possessed anything between his legs at all.

Simone went upstairs and knocked softly on Tess’s bedroom door.

‘Tess, sweetheart?’ she called. ‘Can I come in?’

It had been like this for weeks. Tess emerged only to wash and eat. She didn’t speak. She didn’t engage. She held herself stiffly, as if she were made of glass. What was going on in her head? Anger, sadness, shock; which was the overriding emotion?

It would take time, Simone knew. A bit like training a dog. She was able to close her heart to Tess’s plight because once, many years ago, she too had been forced to make a sacrifice, one for the good of a child, and it had made her tough. If she could get through it, then the rest of the world ought to be able to as well.

She closed her eyes and swallowed hard, to stop herself gagging on the past. When she thought of it, she could still feel the weight of the baby in her arms.

The baby …

Taking Tess was karma. Simone deserved her child.

‘Still pissed with you, is she?’ Lysander passed her in the hall. He wore peppermint shorts and a polo shirt with the collar turned up, and looked offensively handsome. Wasn’t he meant to be at college? ‘Can’t say I’m surprised.’

‘You know nothing about this, Lysander.’

‘I know it’s abduction dressed as Armani.’

‘It is nothing of the sort!’ Simone was aghast.

He grinned.

‘You just stay away from her,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’

Lysander took a step closer. He put a hand on the small of her back and her entire body tingled. ‘What,’ he whispered, ‘like you told me to stay away from you?’

Blushing wildly, Simone turned and flew downstairs. The sooner Lysander moved out of the mansion, the better. He was a diversion she could well do without.

Argentina

Calida’s sixteenth birthday drowned in all the other days.

If she had been capable of feeling, she would have felt her twin’s absence. She would have known that this was the first birthday they had ever spent apart. She would have touched the wound, the searing wound where Teresita had been ripped from her side in the same way she had been ripped at their inception. She would have looked at her hands, her arms, her knees, her chest, heard her breath and her pulse, and questioned what their mirror reflections were doing at this moment, the precise minute and second they had emerged, as two, into the world, sixteen years before.

But she didn’t, because it was any other day, and every day was submerged in the same numb disbelief so that it became impossible to make distinctions.

Her sister had gone. She wasn’t coming back.

Julia admitted it a week into the so-called vacation, unable to hold her tongue any longer. ‘Teresita begged me to let her go,’ she explained, as she exhibited another new acquisition: satin shoes, expensive perfumes, watches and jewels. Calida had thought it strange that Simone had been so generous—but she hadn’t known then the product she had paid for. ‘She begged Simone to take her. Told us she was ready—she was desperate. It’s permanent, Calida. Your sister’s been adopted. She’s gone to live in England. The sooner you come to terms with it then the easier it will be.’

Calida’s body was kicked and punched by her mother’s words. But her mind remained steady, and told her, quite calmly, through the noise: Of course. It was what Teresita had sought: to get away, to flee her humble beginnings, to forge her fortune.

Calida remembered every poisonous sentiment that had spilled from her twin’s lips on the night they had fought and in a ghastly way it added up. Being adopted by a movie star was the opportunity of a lifetime. Teresita hadn’t cared what she was leaving behind—it was no sacrifice to her. When I’m gone, I hope I never come back. I hope I never see you or this dying shit-hole ever again …

After the news, when the shock moved from sky-collapse to mere earth tremors, Calida wrote dozens of letters. Unable to extract Simone’s details from her mother, she instead located her manager online: a Michelle Horner, who had an office in Mayfair, London, and an address to go with it. On searching for the actress, pages brimmed with doppelgangers of the sweating, dishevelled woman who had graced their ranch that day: this one was ravishing. There were stills from her films and onstage; snapshots from articles and interviews, some of a young, wide-eyed Simone, and others where she was older and standing next to a suited fat man, or posing with a blonde girl and a black-haired boy, and looking a little less pleased with herself.