TW physical trauma/blood


"What do you want for dinner?" Rachel asks, even though her niece hasn't uttered more than a syllable to her all day. Lily shrugs apathetically from the passenger seat. "I was thinking of baked potato, unless there's something else you'd prefer?" Lily stares at the wing mirror. "Lils?"

"Mm?"

"What's up?"

"I'm fine." she mumbles into the seatbelt.

"I know you're finding it hard, sweetheart, but we've got to keep to our plan."

"What?"

"The meal plan that the doctor…" Rachel's voice tunes out to a stream of anxious nagging that eventually thins to the silence of the car engine.

"I don't have an eating disorder." Lily murmurs. Rachel tightens her grip on the steering wheel.

"It's nothing to be embarrassed about, sweethear-"

"I don't." Lily snaps. "I don't know what's wrong with me, but it's not that. It's everything, it really isn't that. I don't know why you're so obsessed about what I eat, it's not even... You're not my mother."

"Darling, I love you very much and all I want-" She watches Lily sneer and roll her eyes at the car door. "What?"

"No, you don't." There is a stillness that settles over the leather upholstery of the car, like heavy snow thickening the air. Lily leans against the window ledge and stares out at the road, and part of her can't quite believe she has finally said it out loud.

"What?" Rachel whispers. "Of course I do. Of course I love you, sweetheart. What's… Lily-girl, why would you even say that?"

"You didn't even want me before I was born." Lily whispers. "None of you did, you never have. I'm not that stupid." An eerily familiar smile surfaces on her niece's lips. "It's fine."

"You-" Rachel swallows. "How- Who told you about-" Her breath gets caught in her throat. "It wasn't like that, Lils. It-"

"It was." Lily breathes. "You don't have to lie about it. It's fine. I don't care or anything."

"Of course we wanted you, sweetheart. Of course we did." But Lily's eyes flick back to hers with a coolly cynical gaze, and Rachel realises that, out of anyone, it has always been her niece's judgement she has feared the most.

"No, you didn't. I messed everything up."

"No, darling, that's not your fault that- Oh, Lils, of course I love y-" Lily flinches away from her touch. "Sweetheart, what's brought all this on?" Her mind is blank when she tries to think about it. There isn't anything that started it, not even the muffled conversation in Auntie Rachel's living room. Instead there is the familiar sense that she is out of place, that however she reinvents herself it will always feel just as wrong. She has only ever been a long way from home.

"You hate me, Auntie Rachel." Another incomplete smile. "It's fine. I don't care." The smile stays on, even though it peels away at the edges.

"Of course I don't, darling. Where on earth did you get that idea?"

"You tried to send my mum away, even though you knew she was pregnant with me."

"Lily, it wasn't like that."

"Wasn't it?" Her voice comes out louder than she had expected, louder than she had remembered it could be.

"No, it- I didn't- I just didn't want her there, sweetheart. Your mum knew what she was doing, it was the middle of a school day, and she just turned up out-of-the-blue, and in front of all of Phil's classmates and my work colleagues, and with absolutely no warning to your dad about any of it, and she knew exactly what it would do to us."

"No." Lily whispers. "You didn't want her there because of me."

"That's not true, darling."

"You were devastated. I heard you all talking about it. You hate me."

"I don't."

"You think I'm stupid enough not to realise? You love him, so you have to hate me." Rachel's lips pull apart, then seal closed again.

"Lils, I love you more than you could ever imagine."

"You don't."

"I do, darling. Of course I do."

She watches her niece roll her eyes and sigh at the glovebox.

"Okay, Aunt Rachel." Lily whispers. Numb. "Of course you do."

It happens in slow motion, the way it is shown in action films. Rachel's foot searches for the break and her arm flings out to collide with the air bags that try to cushion her niece from the impact. And somewhere between the broken glass and the car horns blaring, the car stops spinning across the road, and everything is left suspended in a noiseless eternity.

She had shouted 'snap!' and taken the mound of cards from the middle of the table. Her niece had grinned up at her and waited for another card to be placed down. A tiger, a lion, a zebra, flamingo, flamingo. "Snap!" she had shouted again. Lily had giggled and watched her take the new pile away, with an ever-dwindling stack between her small fingers. "Your turn to start, Lils." A monkey, a shark, zebra, koala, hippo, tiger, leopard, shark, dolphin, kangaroo, parrot, parrot. She had held her breath and waited for her niece to slam her palm over the cards and claim them.

And Lily hadn't.

Lily had smiled at her expectantly and rocked onto her knees.

"Auntie Rach, you've got to say snap."

"Why didn't you say it, sweetheart?" She had watched Lily bite her nail and shrug.

"You like winning." She hadn't known what to say to that. Lily was right; she loved winning. "Say snap then."

"Snap." The word had fallen from her lips like a muffled bullet, and her niece's small hands had pushed the mound of cards across the table to her, and she had stared at the two remaining cards held in Lily's fist.

"Your turn now, Auntie Rach."

An octopus. A monkey. A whale. A rabbit.

Lily had shown off her empty palms. "You won again." The beaming smile, the gappy teeth, the searing guilt of victory. "Do you want to play another one?"

"I'm not sure you play it like that, Lils. You've got to try and win."

"Alright."

Two piles of cards. A fox. A crocodile. A hippo. A bear. Two bears. Two brown eyes watching her. Waiting for someone else to take the prize.

"Lils, I don't want to play it with you if you're just going to let me win."

"Alright."

Lily had gone, ran out of the door and vanished. Rachel had leant back against the arm of the sofa and sighed, then placed her cards on the floor, and berated herself for upsetting her niece.

"In here." Lily had pulled on Adam's hand. "Uncle Adam says he wants to play it with you." She had handed him her cards and stood beside him proudly while he slammed each animal card into the middle of the table.

"Snap." Rachel had smiled victoriously at Adam and scooped up the cards from the coffee table. Lily had grinned at her, and then wandered off and not come back, as though she was the problem.

The air is cold outside, and for a moment she can't work out whether she is outside or whether the broken husk of her car still counts as a shelter. The rain speckles her shirt. Her head hurts. Her fingers fumble for the keys and pull them out of the ignition while a small crowd hurries toward an upturned van at the next exit of the roundabout. The airbags droop over her aching hand like old, sagging skin.

"God. You okay, Lils?"

There isn't an answer.

Rachel peels her gaze away from the cloud of black smoke that is billowing out of a van and turns to her niece.

The car door bulges against the small knees and Lily's head hangs over her shoulder, strung up by the seatbelt around her neck.

"Lils?"

A drop sinks into the growing stain on the school shirt. Red tears. Nosebleed. She gave her niece Calpol when she needed love; it seems so glaringly obvious in hindsight.

"Lils?" She reaches across for a limp hand. A bemused chuckle emerges from her throat. "Sweetheart?" A strand of sandy-blonde hair is engulfed into the blood. It trickles out of her ears and down her neck. The whole thing is surreal, her niece is like a macabre sculpture at an art gallery that she wants to laugh at so she won't have to cry. "Lily, sweetheart?" Nothing.

She could have swerved earlier. She could have seen the sports car speeding down the slip road and swerved earlier, out of the way. If only her niece hadn't been arguing with her from the passenger seat. "Lily." She has been trained to do this, to slap little children back to life - someone else's children, not when it is real like this. "Oh for heaven's sake, Lily."

She stares at her, the baby in her sister's smug plan, the fait accompli, the horrible surprise that she had tried to send away. The small weapon in the shape of a little girl with her aunt's light hair and brown eyes that she had wrapped up in a little white blanket and held against her chest and promised to keep safe. Unresponsive.

"Lils, stop it, darling." She smacks the back of the small hand. The skin reddens, then fades back to white.

It had comforted her that Eddie loved her more than the baby. He had said 'we'll solve this' as though Lily was a maths equation that had to be worked through. Broken down. Cracked. She hadn't thought about how much it might crush a child to have their father say, 'I won't have anything to do with the baby', how much that might drain the little girl curled up inside her sister's womb.

"You stop this right now or I'll-"

Lily was right. She hadn't been thrilled. 'Yes, she's pregnant. Yes, it's Eddie's. No, I don't know what I'm going to do about it'. It. It. She hadn't even mumbled a bitter 'congratulations' to celebrate the news. None of them had. Lily hadn't been something to celebrate, she had been an inconvenience, something all too mortal to challenge the undying love. Lily had been a problem before she was even Lily. And she was far too intelligent not to notice. She has always noticed.

"No, sweetheart, Lils, come on. Please, darling, don't do this."

It had hurt when she had realised she was superfluous, that he would abandon her - instead of the small child who had been inconsolable after she'd watched her aunt kill a spider by smacking it with a shoe, who had insisted on taking a mauled rat to the vet in a shoebox despite her aunt's absolute disgust, who had secretly fed the blackbirds half of the organic raspberries from the little ramekin dish. God, why had she ever thought Eddie might choose anyone else over Lily?

"Please don't do this." She unfastens the seatbelt, watches it pull back across her niece's neck, expecting her to sit up at any minute. "Lils?" she whispers, like a small child. She combs the blood through the blonde, tousles the ends the way Lily likes, the way her little sister liked. "Okay?" A nervous smile. "I... I think it's gone a bit far now, darling. I don't..."

Perhaps Auntie Rachel has always been the problem.

She can hear herself crying as though the sound doesn't come from her. The grey-tinged face doesn't move, not even to blink, not even to draw breath, not even when it is held up by lightly tanned, freckled hands that recover the angle of the airway. This is the worst goodbye imaginable. This hurts more than that afternoon in the school playground - that didn't even sting.


It isn't new. She has done this before, walked back into a house while it still lays heavy over the floor like grey fog. She disturbs it with her quiet movements, the shoes on the shoe rack, bare feet up the stairs.

This time there is no still-hysterical thirteen-year-old sister or a seething, mascara-stained mother on the staircase to distract her. She stands in the doorway and stares at the little corner of heaven her niece has abandoned.

Her knees give way and she drops to the floor; the carpet pushes back. She crawls to the wardrobe on her plaster-cast broken wrist, to where her niece has hidden countless times and has never been found. Auntie Rachel had let her hide; Lily hadn't wanted to be found.

The door swings open and it is empty. There is no small girl curled up and staring back at her from behind a little white rabbit with its big silky ears. There is no instantaneous understanding or looking away or calling, 'no, she's not up here, Uncle Adam' as she pretends to search the top shelf of the wardrobe for her 'missing' niece. There is only a black cardigan, soft and crumpled on the floor while the empty hangers rock aimlessly above her.


He has seen her cry. The wedding. The red-rimmed eyes after that awful assembly. The hand pressed to her lips that day in the playground. Then, in the evening, the way she had moved away from the door without a word passing across her lips so that he could collect his things in silence. He had watched her sob, curled up on the sofa. He had wanted to walk towards her, gather her into his arms and tell her none of it was real, that there was no baby.

That was nothing.

That was nothing.

She is on the floor of an upstairs bedroom that he supposes his daughter slept in, her wrist presses into the carpet as she tries to push herself up. Her elbow gives way slightly. Her body is working against her. Each sob is louder than the one before it, deafening, her entire strength is needed to cry this time.

She presses her face into the duvet. Dark pink. It harrows him. She clings to it. She must have chosen that colour for Lily, for their little girl, all three of them.

A scream, piercing, muffled by the duvet. Then she cries again, he watches her fall limply against the bed frame, he listens to the pain. He wants to walk towards her, gather her into his arms and tell her that none of it is real, that the baby is fine.

He does the same as last time. He fetches her a glass of water and places it on the floor beside her as though he is a small child who does not understand the full extent of the situation. She looks up at him the same way. Red-faced. Full of hurt. Full of suppressed rage that he never seems to understand that his actions will always have consequences.

Only this time he cries too.

This time they cling to each other.

He holds her up, big hands around her ribs, his shirt is damp with tears and saliva and mucus, and it doesn't bother him. It couldn't matter less. He lets a few more tears dribble down his weathered cheeks. It is not his way. He is used to anger, to retaliation, to fighting back, to a well-timed punch. That is what he has learned because he is a boy and boys do not cry. But this time all he is left with is the same paralysing torment that he has drowned in before.

"I'm sorry, Eddie."

"It wasn't your fault, Rach."

"It just came out of nowhere. I didn't know what to do."

"I know." he soothes. She is trembling against him, clinging to his shirt sleeves to stay upright.

"I love her so much, Eddie." She can hear her own sobs being absorbed into the collar of his shirt. "I always have. Always."

"I know." he whispers. His palm flattens against her back. "Rach, it's okay. She'll be alright."