You Can Trust Me by Sophie McKenzie Read Free Book Online Page A

service. “So … the West Devon funeral parlor, we’re thinking.” Julia’s mother sniffs. “Anyway, please send me that list of friends and colleagues when you have a moment.”
    In a daze I take down her e-mail address; then I say good-bye.
    An hour passes. The sun blazes outside but I sit at the kitchen table, staring into space. Images of Julia parade through my head—fierce, proud, funny. I think of my traumatized children. Julia loved them. She loved me. If she’d felt down, I would have known. But she was happy and enjoying her work. She was into her new guy, her Dirty Blond. She loved her life.
    I shake my head. It can’t be true. I won’t accept it. There must have been something else, some other factor. I become obsessive in my search for more information. I call all the numbers the police officer gave me. The police confirm the coroner’s verdict of suicide. Julia died between 10 P.M. and midnight. I can’t stop thinking how hectic that evening had been, then how quiet the house seemed after Will left for the airport and how I’d gone to bed thinking it was too late to call Julia back. If only I had ignored convention, as I’m sure Julia herself would have done.
    I call the editors of the interior decorating, beauty, and fashion magazines for which Julia freelanced. I call the bloggers and journalists I met through her. I call the two ex-boyfriends of hers with whom I’m still in touch. And I speak endlessly to Will, who listens patiently as I rant that Julia wasn’t capable of killing herself, and then weep in his arms.
    All these people agree that it is shocking—then they sigh and say that it’s hard, but that we must accept it. They hint, to greater and lesser degrees, that I’m refusing to face the truth only because I feel guilty. Which, they say, I shouldn’t. Some tell me directly that it isn’t my fault. I want to shout at them that I know. That this isn’t the point. Julia’s death is not about me.
    Mum and Will both tentatively suggest I’m letting Kara’s death all those years ago influence me. “But there is no killer here, just a deeply unhappy woman who fooled us all, who put a brave face on things,” Will says, his sympathetic tone belying the fact that he, like everyone else, thinks I’m completely mistaken.
    And so, another week passes, the body is released, the funeral draws near, and Julia’s story is rewritten. She was not really happy and full of life, but secretive and depressed. I hear many mentions of the therapist she saw for several years in her twenties, after Kara died. Likewise, there are frequent references to Julia’s numerous “evenings in with Jack.”
    â€œBut when she said that, it was meant lightly, ironically,” I tell people.
    They purse their lips and talk about solitary drinking and quote stats on whisky and suicide.
    I grow tired of the conversations. I withdraw, watching my children closely. Zack, in that amazing way young children do, is bouncing back—I can see his memories of Julia fading already. Hannah is withdrawn at home, but her teachers say she is behaving normally at school.
    Life slips back into its old groove: I ferry the kids around, shop for groceries, and pay bills. And yet, even as everything remains the same, it is all different. I notice a woman in Jackie O sunglasses and a green jacket coming out of the Waitrose supermarket on Gladstone Road. She looks so much like Julia that I actually follow her for a few steps until she turns a corner and I see the hook nose of her profile and the youthful tilt of her chin and I realize that it isn’t Julia after all. On instinct, I take out my phone to call and tell Julia my mistake. And then I remember. I stand in the street, my shopping heavy in my hands. I can almost hear her caustic cackle: I’d lay off the happy pills, Liv, she’d say. Or: Earth to housewife: