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

Get a grip.
    Every day there is something new I want to tell her: the picture Zack draws of a car that—if squinted at from a particular angle—looks bizarrely like one she used to drive, or the actress I see in some drama who reminds me of an old mutual friend. I try to tell Will instead, but the memories aren’t his, and anyway, he is preoccupied with work and exhausted when he gets home at night.
    And so it is that the two of us talk less and less about Julia, even as I miss her more and more, while through it all, the options turn over in my mind.
    Not sickness. Not suicide.
    Gradually, silently, the only other alternative seeps like a poison into my mind, shifting everything known and unknown.
    No one takes Nembutal by accident. It’s not even legal without a prescription, and Julia’s medical records confirm that she certainly wasn’t prescribed it. Her death wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t her choice.
    Which leaves only one remaining explanation: Someone else took Julia’s life and made it look like she’d killed herself.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    Will takes the day off work so he can go with me to the funeral. He doesn’t think the children should attend. I agree with this when it comes to Zack, who continues to take Julia’s death in his stride and expresses all his feelings in the form of questions: What happens when you die? Is it just your heart stops? When your heart stops, can your brain think? Where will the Julia bit that isn’t her body go? Was it like lying down on the sofa and going to sleep? What would it have felt like? Could it happen to me? Could it happen to you and Daddy?
    I answer his questions as best I can, trying to strike a balance between honesty and reassurance. Sometimes people do get suddenly ill, I explain, but usually only when they are very old and their own children are grown up. It hasn’t occurred to Zack that Julia might have taken her own life—that such a possibility might even exist. I can’t see how his understanding or his grieving will be helped by going to Julia’s funeral.
    That is not the case with Hannah. She asks point-blank what the police have told me about Julia’s death. I hedge a little but cave in under Hannah’s persistence. One look at the horror in her eyes and I regret my honesty. Hannah, unlike Zack, already knows that suicide is possible. But she has no greater resources for understanding how Julia might have killed herself than I do. I tell her that no matter what the police and the coroner and everyone else thinks, I don’t believe the suicide verdict. However, Hannah is swayed by the weight of all the authority figures ranged against me, including that of her own father. She cries in her room, one minute pulling me to her, the next pushing me away. She refuses to talk. Will tries. So does my mum. But Hannah doesn’t speak. I recognize the hurt that bleeds from her eyes. She knows she was special to Julia, and she is asking my own questions: How could Julia take herself away from us? Why weren’t we enough? How could she do this to us?
    I ask those questions every day and I’m still coming up with the same, single, simple answer: Julia would never have killed herself. If nothing else, she would never have let herself be found by my children. She knew we were coming over. Our Sunday lunches were a regular arrangement on weekends when Julia was at home, and we’d confirmed this latest one only two days before. I remember the conversation:
    I’d called to check what time she wanted us to arrive. She’d sounded distracted, her tone uncharacteristically tense and anxious. I’d asked if she was okay and she’d said she was fine, just preoccupied with work. Then she said something that had sounded strange, a vague reference to “looking into something.” She’d mentioned her new man too, Dirty Blond. Was he connected to the thing she was