The Boy with Her Eyes

Chapter 15

The townhouse in Highgate has a front door that doesn't stick. I notice this the way you notice a missing limb—by reaching for resistance and finding nothing.

"Second floor, first door on the left." Edmund sets his keys on the hallway table, Oliver balanced on his opposite hip. "She's been expecting you since four."

I take the stairs two at a time because one at a time means looking at the photographs lining the stairwell—Oliver at one, Oliver at two, a woman with dark hair and a smile I'm not ready to examine. The carpet is thick enough to swallow my footsteps whole.

Blythe's room is bigger than our Kettleworth kitchen. A desk sits under a bay window overlooking a garden with actual grass—not the concrete slab behind our building where the bins lived and the foxes held turf wars.

New art supplies line the desk's edge in a neat row: Prismacolor pencils, Copic markers, a sketchpad thick enough for watercolour. Margaret's doing—I can tell by the precision, everything chosen by a woman who researches before she gives and gives before she's asked.

My sister is cross-legged on a double bed with sheets that have a thread count and a duvet that's never been washed in a bathtub. She looks up from her sketchbook, and something behind my ribs buckles—because she looks rested.

Colour in her cheeks. Shadows under her eyes faded to nothing. The girl on this bed slept last night, and whoever's pillow she slept on wasn't mine.

"You're staring." She tucks her pencil behind her ear and levels me with an expression perfected through years of sibling surveillance. "It's creepy."

"I'm admiring the upgrade." I drop onto the edge of the bed and the mattress doesn't sag or creak or try to fold me in half. "You've gone from IKEA reject to boutique hotel in under a week. I'm jealous, frankly."

"The shower has pressure, Cora. Like water actually wants to come out instead of being guilt-tripped into it." She pulls her knees up and rests the sketchbook on them. "Margaret asked what brands I liked and then bought better ones."

"Sounds like Margaret." My fingers trace the duvet's edge—Egyptian cotton, if the weight means anything, and it does because weight is all I've measured for years. Rent weight, grocery weight, prescription bottles counted in milligrams and pounds sterling.

Everything in this room is light. Everything I couldn't give, arranged in tasteful abundance six feet from where I'm sitting, while six miles south a Kettleworth flat sits under an eviction notice with my name nowhere on the lease.

"Look at this." Blythe turns the sketchbook toward me—a half-finished portrait of Oliver mid-laugh, the proportions startlingly good for someone who's known him a week. She's drawn the curl across his forehead, those enormous green eyes rendered in three shades she mixed herself.

"B, that's—" My throat closes around the word, because the boy on the page has my eyes and my birthmark and my sister drew him without knowing any of it. "That's really beautiful. You've nailed him."

"Sits still for about four seconds, then you work from memory." She shrugs one shoulder, but the corner of her mouth lifts. "He asked me to draw Lightning next and offered to pay me in biscuits."

"Fair rate." I watch her flip to a new page, pencil moving in loose warm-up strokes, and for a few minutes the room holds still. Just us and the scratch of graphite on good paper, afternoon light through a window that faces a garden instead of a brick wall. Almost normal.

Then my eye catches it. On the desk, between the markers and the sketchpad—a manila folder, open, official letterhead, the Kettleworth Medical Centre crest stamped on a form I recognise because my handwriting is on it.

My stomach drops through the mattress and keeps going. "Where'd that come from?" Breezy—the tone is painfully fake, and we both know that.

Blythe's pencil stops. She doesn't look up immediately, which is worse than if she'd snapped her head around, because the pause means she's choosing her response. She learned that from me.

"A social worker came on Tuesday." She sets the pencil down with a deliberateness that turns my blood cold. "Routine welfare check. Asked about my treatment plan."

"Your treatment plan." I repeat it because my mouth needs a task while the rest of me reorganises. "For what, exactly?"

"Wilson's disease. A copper metabolism disorder." Flat, rehearsed, recited like a definition she memorised before I arrived.

"Hereditary." She lets the word sit between us on the cream duvet. "I've apparently had it for two years while you managed it without telling me."

My lungs forget their entire operational history and I open my mouth around her name but nothing follows it. "Blythe—"

"I asked Edmund." She cuts across me with the voice I taught her—level, controlled, the one that kept Dennis from escalating. Hearing it aimed at me is a different kind of violence entirely.

"He showed me the foster file. My full medical history." Her hands are folded on the closed sketchbook, knuckles pale. "He assumed I already knew."

"Of course he did." The words taste like ash—Edmund, thorough and decent, handing my sister the one file I'd have burned.

"He didn't do anything wrong, Cora." Blythe's chin lifts and her eyes are completely, devastatingly dry. "You did."

My hands find the duvet and grip, knuckles going white against cream fabric. The Egyptian cotton bunches in my fists and holds every ounce of force I can't put anywhere else.

"The zinc supplements." She counts on her fingers. "Chelation therapy. The blood tests you called routine—copper-level monitoring."

Her voice doesn't crack—mine would have, at her age. "The college fund. That was treatment money."

"Yes." No point shaping it, wrapping it in the careful language I've used for two years. "All of it."

"How long." Not a question—a demand, stripped of inflection, delivered the way someone delivers a verdict they've already written. "How long have you known."

I could lie. The machinery is right there—oiled, practised, built for exactly this moment. I could say six months and cut the betrayal in half, or say recently and leave the timeline blurred enough for both of us to survive.

My hands release the duvet. I look at my sister—jaw set, eyes dry, spine a straight line against the headboard—and give her the one thing I've never given her. "Two and a half years."

Blythe closes the sketchbook. Her hands move slowly, deliberately—placing it on the desk beside the medical file, aligning the edges the way she aligns everything, the compulsive neatness of a girl who grew up in chaos and learned to control what she could.

She turns back to me, and the eyes that meet mine are our mother's—same green, same shape, same depth that used to make me feel held when I was small enough to disappear into a lap. But the expression behind them has nothing of our mother in it.

Nothing soft. Nothing forgiving. Just a sixteen-year-old girl sitting in a room full of everything her sister couldn't provide, looking at the one person she trusted completely and recognising a stranger.

“I don’t want to see you right now.”