The Perfect Girl

ZOE

Lucas stares at me full on when I ask him if he thinks his dad killed my mum, and the way he does it makes me sure that he knows the answer, but before he says anything there’s a knock on the bathroom door.

‘Everything all right in there, my lovely girls?’

It’s Richard. I don’t think he knows that Lucas is with us, and I don’t want him to, because this is our chance to talk without the others.

‘Yes, we’re fine,’ I call.

‘Do you need a hand?’

‘No. We’ll be down in a minute.’

I look back at Lucas. His expression is sort of cracked now, and he’s holding the bedspread above Grace’s face, his hand frozen in the air, while underneath him she tries to reach for it. He starts to speak, but I put my finger on my lips because I want to make sure that Richard’s gone.

After a few seconds pass, I’m confident that he has, so I say, ‘Did your dad hurt you?’

He winces, and he starts to fight back tears, so I think I know the answer to that.

I ask again, ‘Do you think your dad killed my mum?’

‘No,’ he says, and he whispers it, and now his eyes are full up with a huge, tremendous sorrow. He looks down at Grace, who’s still trying to reach the bedspread, a tiny frown puckering her so smooth forehead. A tear falls from his cheekbone on to the fabric, and darkens it.

A strange expression crosses Lucas’s eyes as he gazes at our sister, and it triggers an impulse in me to snatch the bedspread away in case he plunges it on to her face and smothers her, but before I act he lowers it gently down so that it’s within her reach and Grace’s reaction is practically ecstatic.

Lucas says, ‘I was trying to protect her.’

‘Your mum?’

‘No. Your mum.’

‘What?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘I just need to tell you it was a mistake. I killed her Zoe, but it was by mistake.’

My eyes are brimming hotly now and I feel my lips and chin collapse hopelessly and the muscles in my body seem to dissolve, and I find that I have nothing in me, no words at all that I can give back to Lucas.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘But it was an accident, I swear it was, and I’ve decided I’m going to tell them everything.’

I find myself choking with sobs, convulsed with them. I cover my hand with my mouth to mute them because they’re so violent.

Lucas picks Grace up and holds her close to him, and he sobs too. We sit there like that for what seems like for ever and then he hands Grace to me and says, ‘I’m going to miss her. She’s so perfect.’

His cheeks and upper lip and forehead are glistening with tears and snot and sweat from the heat of the day, and he stands up.

And, as he reaches for the door handle, the phrase that circulates around my mind, and makes me hold my sister to me as tightly as I possibly can, is this: ‘Lucas killed my mother.’