Death Wish (The Ceruleans: Book 1) by Megan Tayte Page A

calmly, so can you. Now answer me this…’ I leaned closer, fixed her
with my eyes and said, ‘Were you in touch with her?’
    Katie blinked. Opened her mouth to speak, then shut it
again. Blinked. Looked down at her coffee. Blinked. Looked back up.
    ‘Katie,’ I said, gentler this time. ‘Please. You have a
sister, I know. How would you feel…’
    At that the tears welled up in her eyes again, and I braced
myself for a fresh wave of histrionics. But she nodded slowly, and then,
finally, out it all spilled – how she’d helped Sienna sneak out of her dorm and
driven her to the station, and the continued contact they’d had thereafter,
until two days before Sienna’s death.
    ‘The emails just stopped,’ she said. ‘I just thought, you
know, that she was holed up with some guy, and she’d be online soon enough to
dish the dirt. But the next thing I knew Mum was calling me, and she said, she
said…’
    She dissolved into a fresh bout of tears. I reached over and
patted her hand awkwardly, and she looked up at me.
    ‘How could she do that to herself? I can’t get my head
around it. There was this girl at our school. Camilla. Her father, he lost
everything – the credit crunch or house prices or something. He went into the
garage and got in his car and gassed himself. Camilla, she was never the same.
And Sienna and I – we talked about it then, and after. She didn’t get it, why
he would do that. Leave his family behind. Hurt people. For Sienna to… it
doesn’t make sense.’
    I didn’t know what to say. She was echoing my own words to
Mother and Father in the days after the news broke. They had dismissed me –
denial, Father had told me, was the first stage of grief. When I’d refused to
let it go, refused to accept that was how my sister had died, he’d contacted a
support organisation for those bereaved by suicide. I’d read the pamphlets. I
understood that questioning why, why, why was part of the natural response of
those left behind. Still, I needed to at least try to find answers. And now,
here was someone who’d known Sienna, known her well, who was similarly shocked
by the manner of her death. It was unsettling.
    ‘She was happy, I thought, you know,’ Katie went on. ‘She
emailed me often, told me about surfing – said it was awesome, the best high.
She sent a picture of herself with the gang. She was seeing one of them, I
think.’
    I had been swilling around the dregs of my coffee,
half-listening and half-thinking about the lies Katie had told my parents, but
at her last words my heart leapt and I looked up sharply. ‘Who, who was she
seeing?’ I demanded.
    But she either didn’t know or was determined not to tell me.
All I got was that he was ‘some surfer dude, and hot – really hot’. I asked to
see the picture, but she hadn’t kept it. Teeth gritted, I told her pleasantly
that should she find it, perhaps in her deleted items folder, could she please
forward it to me. Wide-eyed, she nodded.
    Having wrung everything out of her, I left Katie to finish
her third black coffee. The last I saw of my sister’s best friend was through
the window of the cafe as I drove away. Head back, she was laughing, hand
placed flirtatiously on the barista’s arm.
    Back home, I puzzled over the new information. If Katie was
right, Sienna had been involved with someone in Twycombe. Was it even relevant?
Sienna was hardly a nun; she had a steady stream of boyfriends, each as
meaningless to her as the last. Had something more happened here – had she been
serious with some guy? Who? And did her death have anything to do with him? Why
hadn’t she told me about the relationship – God knew she loved to tell me juicy
details, dangle in front of me her desirability and conquests as a ‘Look at me,
and then look at you, poor sis, all single’.
    It might have been something, or it might have been nothing.
But for now, it was the only thing I had to go on. I was fast mastering
surfing, and in doing so