“Whole life.” Sunny had stopped speaking in sentences – words would have interfered too much with her attempt to devour her ice cream in less than twenty seconds.
When Ryan caught him watching her, he gave Lucas the slyest of smiles and came very close to being pushed off the wall and onto the sand.
Predictably, given that she’d made it her mission, Sunny finished first, everyone else taking time to savour what they’d paid for. As she brushed the crumbs of her cone onto the thighs of her leggings, then down onto the sand below, she took a short, in-out breath.
“So – and I know you’re all going to hate me for this – but are you lot ever actually going to talk about Freya?”
WIN
Of course it would be Sunny who brought her up – just when Sophie had stopped.
“She has a point,” Lucas said, backing up Sunny automatically because the two of them were adorable. “Last night we were all yelling at each other—”
“Or hitting,” Ryan stuck in, but Win arched her brows in his direction and hissed, “You dunked him in the sea. Let it go.”
“All because of Freya’s parcel,” Lucas pressed on. “Then we read our letters and we’re here. Together.”
Before he’d even finished, everyone other than Sunny was shaking their head, objecting to the Disney-movie spin Lucas was giving this.
“No.” Win’s voice was loudest and firmest, because that’s exactly how she felt. “I’m not here because Freya told me that I could trust you.” She noticed Ryan and Lucas pass a furtive look and wondered what they’d talked about in the laundrette. “I’m here because yesterday ended pretty badly. I don’t just mean for Sophie, up by the church, but when I finally got to read my letter, it made me cross.”
“How so?” Lucas asked, but it was Sunny who was looking at her the most intently. Sunny, who was always the first person Win shared anything with, who’d not heard a peep about what had been in Freya’s letter.
“There’s things I don’t want to talk about just yet with you guys.” Win felt Sophie lay her hand gently over her fingers, hidden from view by everyone else. “But Freya said a lot of stuff that made me feel like she thought she knew me better than she did. I felt … manipulated by what she said, by what she did with the parcel. So, although some of what she said turns out to have been right, that maybe I have enjoyed hanging out with you” – when she gave Ryan a slightly disapproving smile, he almost returned it – “I don’t like the idea that I’m only here because she wanted me to be. I’m here because I want to be.”
She sighed.
“Also, she said I was intimidating and—”
“You are.”
“Totally.”
“I’m actually a bit scared of you.”
“You should be. This one time, when we were eight—”
Win rolled her eyes as Sunny started misquoting Ragnarok. “Oh my God, if one of us was Thor it would not be you.”
Sophie leaned in and quietly said, “Surely you’d be Valkyrie?” And Win thought she might die from joy.
SOPHIE
Making Win smile was a reprieve. What Sophie needed to do was to stop avoiding the subject and meet it face on. Telling this lot about her lupus, talking to Win on the beach – all of it made Sophie feel stronger, like she wasn’t in this alone any more.
“What was in your letter, Lucas, that makes you think this is what she wanted?” Sophie said. “I can’t see any answer in mine.”
“There is, though,” Lucas said. “She thanked you for trusting her, said she missed you. That’s pretty much all she said in mine.”
But Sophie was shaking her head. She was done reaching for the answers she wanted when the truth was closer to hand.
“I’ve been sending her a message every day since she left.” She felt the ripple of revelation pass along the wall. “If she really missed me all she had to do was reply. As for trust… I thought she wanted me to deliver that parcel and follow her trail because I was going to get an explanation for why she left.” She looked across at Ryan and felt an unfamiliar pang of guilt. “Something that meant I could stop blaming myself or…”
“Me?” Ryan said and Sophie shrugged.
“You kind of set yourself up for it.” She wanted to ask him what had happened. Whether he and Freya had been something more than a one-off mistake. She’d known him for years, but she felt now like she didn’t know him at all. Much the same as Freya.
“Maybe that’s the problem?” Lucas said, frowning into the sand. “You think it’s something one of you did. I don’t think that it was. I think the only person Freya made the decision for was her. Not in a selfish way…”
He broke off with a sigh, like he was impatient with the words and Sophie swore she could see Sunny’s pupils turn to love hearts.
“I’m not saying this right.”
“Do you mean that leaving is something Freya needed to do for herself?” Win offered.
“I do.” Lucas cast her a grateful look. “She always talked like she was thinking of how everyone else would react. In my letter she apologised for never letting us be friends because she’d worried how Kellan would react.”
There was a poignant pause as everyone looked at Ryan, but his gaze was fixed on the horizon.
“That does sound like Freya,” Sophie said, quietly.
All of a sudden Ryan turned away from the sea to look across at them.
“Lucas is right. That’s why Freya kept coming over, only wanting to know me out of school, when it was just us. She said she never felt like she had to perform.”
A revelation that broke Sophie’s heart just that little bit further because she knew now, for sure, that Freya had performed for her. They both had. A vicious circle of behaving the way each thought the other wanted to see.
This was why she’d never known about Ryan. Because Freya had pretended to hate him and Sophie had taken on the role of supportive friend.
For a while I worried Morgan was right, that Ryan had a thing for you.
Worried?
You’d have ended up with the wrong cousin.
Maybe she had.
Ryan shifted position on the wall, shirt falling open because they’d forgotten to check if it had any buttons. With the shorts and that shirt, hair crusted with salt from the sea, he looked like an extra from Romeo + Juliet that they’d watched at the end of Year 8.
Actually, from this angle, maybe if he had longer hair and less obvious ears, Ryan’s weaselly little face had a smidge of Leonardo DiCaprio-ness. The squinty eyes and slappable mouth maybe.
Sophie couldn’t help herself. “Why you, Ryan?”
RYAN
Ryan didn’t know how to answer Sophie’s question. It wasn’t like he’d ever made himself worthy of Freya’s attention. Except that had been the point, hadn’t it?
“She saw through my bullshit. Looked harder than anyone else ever did.” He scuffed the heel of his shoes against the wall. “Liked what she saw for some reason.”
He knew they were all looking at him. All listening. Having started the conversation, Sunny was now nothing but wide eyes and flapping lugholes.