PART 1
We need a million dollars.
My mother said it standing in the middle of my apartment as though nineteen years had not happened.
She said: and you’re going to give it to us, because Celestine is still your sister.
Those were the first words Leonora had said to me in almost two decades.
No apology. No hello. Not even how have you been.
I was thirty-five, standing by the windows with the rain coming down the glass, and I had let them up because my concierge rang me and said there was a couple downstairs saying they were my parents, and I wanted to see what that felt like.
My father put a thick folder down on the coffee table.
He said: Celestine made a mistake. If the money’s replaced before the audit next week, it can be handled quietly.
I looked at the folder. Then at him.
I said: and why would I be the one to fix it?
And my mother gave a little laugh with nothing in it, and said:
Because you owe this family.
I stood there for a second.
Then I looked down at my left leg.
The titanium shows below the hem of my trousers. It always does. That is a choice I made a long time ago and I have not changed it for boardrooms, for photographs, or for anybody.
I tapped it. Twice. With two fingers.
I said: I owe you?
The colour went out of her face.
I was ten when they found the cancer in that leg. It was aggressive and it was fast and within a few weeks they took it above the knee.
I remember waking up in that room afterwards. The light was wrong. Somebody was talking in the corridor.
I put my hand under the blanket.
And then I cried for my mother, the way you do when you are ten.
She came hours later.
She did not hug me. She did not sit down in the chair by the bed.
She stood at the foot of it, looking at the flat part of the sheet where my leg was not, and she said:
What are we supposed to do with you now?
I was ten years old.
And from that afternoon I stopped being her daughter and became the problem. The complication. The thing that had to be worked round.
My sister stayed at the centre of everything.
