I’ll be home for Christmas by Roisin Meaney

Author:Roisin Meaney [MEANEY, ROISIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC044000
Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland
Published: 2015-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Her sister had pale brown hair, cut short as a boy’s. Pretty face, blue eyes, a lighter colour than Tilly’s, the whites shot with fine red lines. Short, only about Lien’s height, or maybe an inch or so taller. Slim probably, hard to be sure under the bulky orange sweater that came to the middle of her thighs and looked more like a man’s.

An accent different from the people in Kilmally, different from the couple who’d given them the lift from the pier. More like Colette’s accent, but not quite the same.

Her sister was a mother with five children. Two sets of twins, it looked like. A pair of red-headed freckle-faced boys, another of blonde curly-headed girls, and one plump cherub called Poppy. Tilly hadn’t known that about her: children hadn’t been mentioned. She’d been told so little about her sister.

Married, their mother had said. She’s Laura Connolly now. Living on a small island called Roone, off the west coast of Ireland. She’ll be thirty on the first of August. And that had been all, and Tilly hadn’t asked any more, still trying to absorb the fact that she had a sister.

Five children. Tilly had three nieces and two nephews.

A big old house, a bed and breakfast business. A husband Tilly had yet to meet.

The angry man who’d opened the front door had been so unexpected, so shocking. He’d sent the words she’d been rehearsing flying right out of her head, leaving her completely thrown. And then the door opened again and Laura was suddenly there: Laura Connolly was suddenly standing there. Tilly knew immediately who she was, who she had to be.

Laura, her sister, who still didn’t know, but who was beginning to realise, who must realise, that Tilly – stuttering and stammering and making a total mess of it, because now that they were face to face, it was the hardest thing in the world to say – Laura must realise at this stage that Tilly wasn’t just a stranger looking for a place to stay.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, eyes narrowing.

Say it. Say it. Just say it.

‘I’m your sister,’ Tilly said.

‘We’re sisters,’ she said.

‘You’re my sister,’ she said.

Three times she said it, in case once wasn’t enough.

The news was greeted with dead silence, apart from the baby’s rapid little breaths as she gawped, from the safety of her mother’s arms, at the person who was in fact her aunt.

Then Laura began to shake her head slowly. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake. I don’t have a sister, I’m an only child. My parents separated when I was twelve and my mother went to—’

She stopped dead. She blinked a few times.

‘Australia,’ Tilly finished. ‘She went to Australia.’

The skin between her sister’s eyes pleated.

‘Her name is Diane Potter,’ Tilly went on. ‘I met her last June, in Brisbane. I was adopted. She put me up for adoption.’

‘No,’ Laura said, shaking her head again, more decisively. ‘I mean, no, sorry, you can’t be. My parents separated a long time ago, they’re divorced now, they didn’t have any more children.

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