Stay Away

warm like i'd hoped

When I find Fleur, I am appalled by the state she is in. It amplifies my guilt, inflating it like a giant balloon, because the pathetic excuse for my sister residing in Barcelona only confirms how impossible it is for anyone else to truly sort her out. I apologise to her, because this is clearly my fault. It's easy to forget about Leah when the most important person in my life is decaying internally in a foreign country. She has been left so alone. It's hard to keep it together at the sight of her.

I slap her, at a loss on what to do. Fleur's haunting laughter mixes with her incoherent babbling about Scarlett and marriage and a proposal that never actually happened. "Scarlett is dead; she is not coming back," I tell her gently. It seems to sink in.

We get drunk. I use it to suppress the rising memories of how I left things in England, and Fleur pretends to be reluctant about being allowed to loosen up for once. She leaves with a woman named Anne. They are too drunk to recognise each other, but they have slept together before, and I poke fun at it but don't make an effort to remind them. Their father and Papa are business partners. A mutual connection.

Lars keeps me sane when we are left alone. "Don't worry about it, Jaimie. She doesn't understand, but you cannot fault her for that. She will listen; she will learn." He smiles at me, and I remember a time where I would have found an empty bedroom in whichever house we were in and dragged him to the bed. But, I feel nothing inside me set ablaze as he wraps me in his embrace. Of course I don't. I still love Leah, even if she can sometimes be so short-sighted.

"I wish things could be different," I mumble into his shoulder, a salty tear pooling at the corner of my mouth. I sniff.

"Ja, me too," he replies, a certain sadness creeping over us. "She makes you happy enough to agonise over an argument. She's good for you. Talk to her, make sure she knows she hasn't lost you."

I don't talk to her. I'm too busy hauling a red-faced Fleur to Amsterdam, telling her to fight off her hangover on the plane. It feels wrong to call Leah when I am at home – I think it would make things worse.

Papa is thrilled to see Fleur, and prefers for me to keep my sister company if I must be distracted from my recovery.

It is six o'clock in the evening when Papa and I sit on the armchairs in the trophy room, a glass of whiskey in his hand and a tennis racquet in mine. I twirl the racquet in my palm, the worn grip hard and sharp against the bones in my hand. The strings are loose and bending, faded from age and use and anger. My nail plucks one, pinging a dull sound into the otherwise quiet room. I do it again. "Stop that," Papa chides, setting his glass down on the glass cabinet that holds Fleur's silver boot from the 2017 Euros.

I furrow my eyebrows, taking in the sheen of the silver. "She came joint-second, and yet it sits pride-of-place in here?"

He smiles, a chuckle dropping from his lips as though he had expected me to say that. "Second place is not an achievement for you, the same way getting ninety-percent on a physics test wouldn't be. But, for Fleur, who must fight harder, second is big. Ninety is big." I scoff, finding that to be bullshit. "No, it is true. Until she wins the Ballon d'Or, we cannot overestimate her. You have already won all there is to be won."

"Wimbledon," I remind him, a bitter taste in my mouth. "I haven't won that."

"Look at the cabinet more carefully, Jaimie." I lean closer. There, behind Fleur's award, sits my Wimbledon runner-up plate from 2016. "We cannot overestimate you, either."

I clench my jaw, teeth grating together uncomfortably. "When you make me cry, Papa, does it ever occur to you that you are being too harsh?" He straightens up in his chair, but then relaxes, laughing once again. I look around the room at my achievements, wondering why he gets to display them.