Читать книгу Don’t You Cry - Cass Green - Страница 13

Angel has seen her brother at his lowest ebb before, but this is something different. It is beginning to scare her now, the desperate look in his eyes. She hasn’t seen him for months and now this?

If he’d only tell her the whole story. She hasn’t had all of it, she knows that. It’s something about the way his gaze keeps sliding away from hers, like he’s frightened to meet her eyes full on.

When he’d rung earlier, Angel had been on her way back to a mate, Liz’s, where she’d intended to kip until the next morning. Then, bright and early, she planned to be off into London where she’d blow her money on a ticket to Inverness. She was really going to do it, too, this time. Make a fresh start in the clean sweet air, away from all the crap.

When her brother’s name had appeared on her screen she’d had the briefest moment when she contemplated not answering. It would serve him right for his recent lack of contact.

But she couldn’t do it. She could never really say no to Lucas.

When she heard the state he was in, she’d known straight away that this was it, a turning point in her life, albeit not the one she had been hoping for. He’d been incoherent with gasping sobs. As Angel tried to get him to calm down and tell her what had happened, it felt like everything inside her was swirling helplessly down a plughole. Whatever this was, it was very bad indeed.

She’d finally managed to extract the barest details from him and, while they’d sounded terrible enough, they hadn’t been everything. There was something missing.

It feels like he doesn’t trust her and that is beginning to piss her off. Hasn’t she always been the one to protect him? Didn’t she promise to do that very thing when they were kids?

Whatever he has done, they can find a way through it. How bad can it really be?

He just needs to calm down. Then they can make a proper plan and get the hell away.

The baby is on the table, next to her, screaming its head off still. The noise road-drills inside Angel’s skull. She shoots a look at the squalling creature. Tiny babies are so weird, with their jerky little limbs and crumpled pensioner faces. Strong and delicate all the same time. God knows she doesn’t want to have to hold it.

Angel’s disobedient brain immediately lobs an unwelcome image into her mind, like a shuttlecock over a net.

Her skinny sixteen-year-old legs with blood running down them, and the awful pains slicing across her stomach. The unsympathetic way the people in the hospital had spoken to her, about how she only had herself to blame and that she may have done some ‘permanent damage’.

Lucas keeps gazing at the baby, mournfully. It isn’t even his. But Angel knows her brother and has a strong suspicion that he isn’t going to agree to leaving it and getting the hell out of here. Why even bring it in the first place? It’s insane.

She pictures the bus to Scotland, weaving its way between soft green hills. Travelling far, far away from here.