The Game You Played by Anni Taylor Read Free Book Online

age nine, Saskia commandeered Kate and Pria into our unruly gang. The five of us made a force to be reckoned with, even if most of us were girls. Bernice Wick had come in last, but she was never one of the gang. Not because she was a couple of years older but because she just didn’t fit with us. She was too damned strange.
    Phoebe didn’t try at all. She didn’t have to. She had an aura about her even back then. Her name had been Phoebe Vance. She was fiercer than anyone, but she’d drop everything and climb a tree or drainpipe in a flash if someone’s mangy kitten had got itself stuck. She entranced me with large brown eyes that seemed like they could shoot lasers if she chose them to.
    All of us were in and out of each other’s houses on the weekends. Except for Phoebe’s house. Her father, Morris, dominated the Vance family home. His moods controlled the atmosphere. Stormy day, winter or roasting summer, it was all under Morris’s sky. Phoebe’s mother reminded me of a sapling, struggling to find its way above the forest canopy to find its own sunlight, but ending up aging and withering where it stood. It was obvious to me that Phoebe had learned to put up a protective barrier. If her father was raging, she pretended to understand and she sidestepped him. If he was drunk and bitter, she’d get him coffee and cake. If he was in one of his rare sunny moods, she’d laugh along with him.
    But I watched her. I saw her fingers twisting around each other as she laughed. I saw her smile drop like a stone when she left a room in which her father was. I heard the false tone in her voice when she asked if he was okay and if she could get anything for him.
    Phoebe was always acting. Pretending that her life was better than it was. You could hear her father roaring at her mother, and Phoebe would come out of the house with her head up and a smile. No wonder she became an actor as a career choice. She’d had plenty of practice.
    I wanted to save her and give her a different life.
    I worked hard, and it was all for her. I built up a real estate agency that was one of the best in the city—and the most profitable. I wanted her to be proud of the man I’d become. I’d be her port in the storm, always. I’d never be the storm.
    I knew that Phoebe loved her mother, but she never respected her. Roberta Vance had poured all her energies into the house. It had to look exactly right at all times. Especially during Morris’s meanest bouts. Her dinners were legendary. She pored over recipe books and came up with meals that made me secretly wish she’d teach them to Phoebe. It seemed that the worse Morris got, the more effort Roberta put into dusting and arranging every item in the house. As though putting the house into order somehow neutralised Morris’s tantrums. She could clean and mop and sterilise Morris’s existence in the house. At times, I caught her counting and recounting things. And dusting imaginary dust.
    When cancer got Phoebe’s mother, it seemed to me like the house itself had crawled inside her. All of the caustic cleaning chemicals and Morris’s rage mixed together into one toxic brew.
    Phoebe was just sixteen then. She was left living with her father and Nan—her maternal grandmother. How Nan had produced a daughter like Phoebe’s mother, I’ll never figure. When I was growing up, I always saw Nan as a scowling, embittered but stoic presence. She was still there, the old battle-axe, firmly wedged into the wood of the house. Nothing—not the government or anyone else—was ever going to dislodge her.
    Morris drank himself into an early death a decade after Phoebe’s mother died. In those years, he’d had a continuous startled look on his face, as though he couldn’t accept that she was really gone. As though at any moment, she was going to come back through the door, put his shoes away, and make him dinner.
    Phoebe was living in London then. I’d been on an extended holiday, staying with her. And she