Okay, this is the last one! Thank you everyone for reading and for all the lovely feedback, hopefully some happier stories to come!
She perches on the dressing table, teases blonde hair out of the headband, flicks the shorter strands over the crystals. They are plastic crystals, but it looks the same. Her niece still looks like a princess.
"Okay." she whispers. Two brown eyes watch her. Cracked lips coated in lip-gloss. Fake eyelashes. Painted nails. Lily refuses to wear anything on her skin other than SPF. Rachel had rolled her eyes and put the bronzers and concealers away.
Lily stares at herself in the mirror and bites her nail, a bad habit from a lifetime ago. "Lils." Her aunt pulls her wrist down. "You're wearing Dior on your nails, alright? It's not to nibble on." Lily grins, for the first time since she sat down in that chair in her aunt's bedroom to get ready.
"Sorry." she mumbles. "Nervous."
"Yeah." Rachel nods. "It's only one night, sweetheart. Just make the most of it. It'll be alright." Her niece doesn't look so sure. "I've got something for you." She walks over to her wardrobe, pulls down a box from the highest shelf, then lifts out a shoebox. There are two jewellery cases inside. Green felt. Black leather. She decides to leave the notes that came with them. "You don't have to wear them or anything, but it's…" She hands them to her niece.
"Oh." A diamond bracelet sparkles back, and a silver watch.
"Well, they're yours."
"Thanks." Lily touches the watch, hesitantly, like it could burn her. "Were they Grandma's?"
"No, they-" Rachel pushes the box back onto the shelf. "They're from your dad - he wanted me to look after them for you." She says it effortlessly. She has been practicing in the mirror.
"Can I wear the bracelet?"
"Yeah." She lifts it out and lays it over Lily's wrist, then fastens the clasp together. "There." Her niece plays with it the same way she did, spinning it around, watching it twinkle as it catches the light.
"Thanks."
"That's alright."
"Can you take a picture? He wanted me to send him one before I go."
"Yeah, course I can."
She drops Lily at Tia's house, watches her get swept up in the crowd of year elevens and carried away to the garden.
"Oh, hi." Tia's mum emerges from the kitchen. "Sorry, the doorbell's playing up."
"Oh." Rachel smiles and shakes her head.
"Tea? Or coffee?"
"No, I'll- You've got a houseful. I'll see you later."
"See you soon, Rachel."
She walks back over the driveway, listens to the front door close behind her, finds her keys in her pocket. A deep breath, car door, she sits down, pulls the door shut and closes her eyes. She hates every goodbye, every milestone, every candle that is added to her niece's birthday cake. They all hurt. She loves them and hates them.
She worries that she doesn't have the expertise to raise a child. She stares back at the slammed doors she has learnt not to obstruct, mops up alcohol-induced vomit splattered over the bathroom floor, calms the panic attacks that crawl into bed with her in the dead of night. She is so proud of her, and so excited, and so terrified, and so overwhelmed by how much she loves her. It exhausts her; she wants to stay exhausted forever.
All she can do is cry, sat in her car on a suburban street while the earth goes on spinning around her. The last four years have been a whirlwind of homework, and late-night fairy cakes, and clothes that have already been grown out of, and sleepovers, and pep talks, and adolescent lectures about the environment, and birthday parties, and endless, endless laundry. And the twilight at the end of the school day, the amber hours that had previously been reserved for someone else, when she walks down to the school library to find their little girl waiting for her, staring back with a knowing smile. It has all gone far too quickly.
The passenger door opens, freckled arms wrap around her, blonde hair against her cheek. A quiet kiss into her hair the same way she has kissed the blonde hair a thousand times. She looks at Lily, leaning awkwardly across the seatbelts in her prom dress to hug her.
"Are you okay?" She nods, sending another wave of tears down her cheeks.
"You're all grown up, Lils." she whispers. Her niece raises her eyebrows sceptically at her. A kiss to the crystal hairband. "You have a nice time, darling."
"Aren't you going to come in for pictures?"
"Oh."
"Everyone else's mums are there. You won't be the only one." She nods at the brown eyes. Lily buys two cards on Mother's Day now, only one present. This year it was lavender from the garden centre. She was told it was mostly a present for the bees.
"Alright."
She stands gawkily on the patio, away from the crowd, trying to act as though she is not the headteacher. She knows she has ruined all the photos anyway with her tense headmistress smiles.
She brushes her hands against the freckled arms, her niece reaches up and pulls them around her, intertwines their fingers. Lily is so much less embarrassed by the whole headteacher thing than her nephew always was.
"Smile." someone orders, and she does, properly, brimming with love.
Lily doesn't let go, even when the woman with the newest iPhone has moved on.
"You going to get some pictures with your friends?"
"Yeah." Their hands fall apart. "Don't go or anything though." Lily mumbles.
She is beckoned into a group of girls the same way her aunt is engulfed seamlessly by a crowd of mothers.
There is a flurry of panic when the cars arrive, last minute makeup inspections and hurried photos, a round of shots that Rachel pretends not to see.
"I've got to go now." Lily tells her, fiddling with the ribbon at the waist of her dress.
"Alright. Have a good time, darling. Be sensible." She watches Lily nod anxiously, fingers studying the velveteen bow at her back. "I'll keep my phone on." Her niece stares at her like the little girl in a pink coat in her office, waiting for her to change her mind and let her come home instead. "Go on, Lily-girl, you'll be alright." A glossed lip is chewed at.
She holds her arms out and Lily falls into them. A crowd of her ex-pupils watch from a distance.
"I can't do it." Lily whispers into her top. It's a silly thing, a vestigial idea from a childhood in which she never felt loved by her parents, an 'inferiority complex' according to her therapist, that formed from an 'insecure attachment'. Sometimes she only feels good enough when she pretends she's someone else. Her aunt is the only person who seems to understand it.
Rachel steps back, holds onto Lily's hands with a soft smile.
"You can do it, sweetheart." She squeezes the little fingers. "You're going to have a lovely time with everyone at prom, and at the after-party, and if you decide you don't want to stay over then that's alright. You just ring me, and I'll come and pick you up, how's that?" Her niece nods up at her. "Alright then, my gorgeous girl, have a nice time."
She feels the diamond bracelet and the cold, silver watch on Lily's wrists against her skin, like something from another life. Oh, darling, it does, it does make sense.
"I love you, Auntie Rach."
"Oh, Lils, I love you too." Rachel whispers back. She does, more than she's ever loved anyone before. She hadn't thought that was possible.
She watches her niece slip away, wishes she could go back to that fateful day in the playground and press her fingers over her little sister's stomach and whisper to Eddie's baby that she loved her, just so that Lily would know. Just to make sure she knew. She would relive that day as often as possible if it meant she could hold her niece, if it meant they got Lily.
It does make sense; she knew it would eventually.