All We Left Unsaid Read online

  PRAISE FOR NATALIE K MARTIN

  ‘A significant new voice in Women’s Fiction.’

  Pride Magazine

  ‘Thought-provoking, emotionally intelligent.’

  Daily Mail

  ALSO BY NATALIE K MARTIN

  Love You Better

  Together Apart

  Wanderlust

  What Goes Down

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Natalie K Martin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542029551

  ISBN-10: 1542029554

  Cover design and illustration by Ghost Design

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  Prologue JESS

  Chapter One JESS

  Chapter Two IVY

  Chapter Three JESS

  Chapter Four JESS

  Chapter Five JESS

  Chapter Six IVY

  Chapter Seven JESS

  Chapter Eight JESS

  Chapter Nine JESS

  Chapter Ten IVY

  Chapter Eleven JESS

  Chapter Twelve IVY

  Chapter Thirteen IVY

  Chapter Fourteen IVY

  Chapter Fifteen JESS

  Chapter Sixteen IVY

  Chapter Seventeen JESS

  Chapter Eighteen IVY

  Chapter Nineteen JESS

  Chapter Twenty IVY

  Chapter Twenty-One IVY

  Chapter Twenty-Two IVY

  Chapter Twenty-Three JESS

  Chapter Twenty-Four IVY

  Chapter Twenty-Five JESS

  Chapter Twenty-Six IVY

  Chapter Twenty-Seven IVY

  Chapter Twenty-Eight IVY

  Chapter Twenty-Nine JESS

  Chapter Thirty IVY

  Chapter Thirty-One IVY

  Chapter Thirty-Two JESS

  Chapter Thirty-Three JESS

  Chapter Thirty-Four JESS

  Chapter Thirty-Five JESS

  Chapter Thirty-Six JESS

  Chapter Thirty-Seven JESS

  Chapter Thirty-Eight JESS

  Chapter Thirty-Nine JESS

  Chapter Forty JESS

  Chapter Forty-One JESS

  Chapter Forty-Two JESS

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and righting, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’ – Rumi

  Prologue

  JESS

  August, this year

  ‘He found her, just lying there.’

  My eyes sting as I look down, blinking against another surge of hot tears. I can’t stop them from escaping and burning their way down my cheeks before landing on my leg. I try to make sense of those words again and look up at Maddie, who is holding a mug of hot tea towards me. She doesn’t say anything as I take it from her. She doesn’t have to. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve repeated the sentence in the past half-hour.

  I roughly wipe another tear from my cheek and shake my head again as Maddie sits next to me on the sofa. Hearing Finn’s voice on the phone had felt like walking into a golden memory. Warm and safe. Until the words he’d said ripped away the last bit of family I had left.

  Ivy’s dead.

  My little sister. His words had cut through me like a knife.

  ‘He said she just didn’t wake up,’ I say, replaying the conversation to Maddie again. I keep a neutral tone to my voice, as if it might somehow help the words to land in a way that makes sense. ‘He said she fell asleep and just didn’t wake up.’

  Maddie sighs heavily. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I keep thinking it has to be some kind of weird joke, you know?’

  They say the death of a loved one can make time feel like it’s stopped. It isn’t true. Since Finn called, the world outside has continued to turn. It doesn’t make sense to me that I’ve spent the day doing normal stuff, going to work, stopping at the supermarket on the way home, ordering takeaway . . . and all while my sister had been dead. If only the world would stop, I might be able to catch my breath and make sense of it all.

  Ivy. My little sister. Dead. The words don’t belong in the same sentence and they make my body shiver. I pull the sleeves of my jumper down over my hands as an image of her lying in bed flashes in my mind. I picture her brown skin against white sheets, locked in an endless sleep. Her limbs growing cold, which would never happen in reality. She was always the warm-blooded one out of the two of us. I lift the cup of tea to my mouth, blow on the steaming liquid and then put it straight back down again.

  ‘I always thought we’d sort things out before something serious happened,’ I say, but it isn’t as if serious things haven’t happened since we’d stopped talking. ‘I don’t know how it’s really been seven years.’ A frown pulls at my eyebrows.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s been that long,’ Maddie replies.

  We’d shared our lives. Ivy and I had made blanket forts and created dance routines as kids. We’d obsessed over pop stars and boy bands, shared bottles of Clearasil and spent Saturday afternoons in Tammy Girl as teenagers. As adults we’d shared a flat and a car. And then it had all come falling down. Seven years. Guilt drops in my stomach like a lift in free fall.

  ‘I should’ve tried harder,’ I mutter.

  ‘You did, Jess.’

  ‘Not hard enough,’ I reply harshly. ‘She’s my little sister, and my responsibility.’

  I heave a sigh and rub at the headache building in my temples. The lingering scent of lemongrass from our curry dinner floats under my nose from the smeared plates on the coffee table in front of us. Maddie’s glass of Malbec is almost empty, and mine still holds a sip of the one unit of red wine I allow myself each night.

  I look down at the coffee table. Our MacBooks sit side by side and my ring-bound planner is open in front of me. The rose-gold pen Maddie bought me for my birthday last year still has its cap off, exactly as I’d left it to answer the call from a number I hadn’t recognised. I take the pen and put the cap on it to stop it from drying out.

  ‘I’ll take care of all this,’ Maddie says, leaning forward to close her laptop. ‘You don’t need to be thinking about work right now.’

  ‘It’s always helped before,’ I reply, and it’s true.

  Work has been the one thing that’s always been there to catch me. I’d buried myself in it to block out missing Ivy and Finn, not to mention escaping my marriage. The suitcase propping open the living room door is like a sign declaring my almost divorced status, along with all the other boxes and bags dotted throughout the flat, creating trip hazards and bouts of anxiety every time I pass them. It’s almost three months since I moved in, and most of my things are still boxed up. My natural need for order and zero clutter was clearly lost along the journey from one end of London to the other when a van full of boxes transported my old life into a new one. The only thing that makes this place feel remotely like home is the macramé wall hanging that had been a wedding gift.

  ‘I just don’t want you to feel like you’r
e alone.’ Maddie reaches across and puts her hand on my knee, giving it a little squeeze.

  ‘I know I’m not.’ I put my hand on top of hers. ‘Thanks, Mads. I’m glad you were here.’

  The thought of having been alone to take that call makes my insides shudder as I drag myself up from the sofa to go to the toilet. Afterwards, I splash my face with water and look at my reflection in the mirror. My upturned eyes are puffy and red, and tears have left tracks on my cheeks. I close my eyes and press my fingers against them, momentarily relieving the building headache. I can already feel it’s one that’ll stay with me until tomorrow, but I hate taking painkillers. I take a deep breath before releasing my fingers and catching my reflection again.

  I look right into my eyes, so dark I can barely see where the iris ends and the pupil begins. We had the same eyes, Ivy and I. Inherited from Mum. Eyes a man could get lost in, Dad would always say when he reminisced about her. We’d looked similar as kids too, with our conker-brown skin and long, thin limbs, but we couldn’t have been any more different. There was just one year between us in age, but we were miles apart in personality. Ivy was the definition of attitude and intensity. She was the mouthy one, who’d talk back and take what she wanted and scream with the unfairness of everything, especially when we were in our early teens. I was the quiet one who took what was given and got on with life, unfair or not. Ivy was like a Tasmanian devil, leaving a riot of upturned chaos wherever she went, borrowing clothes and giving them back with stains and cigarette burns, if I ever got them back at all. Not that it happened too often. My style was far too conservative for her. She was infuriating, and a royal pain in the backside sometimes. And I don’t remember ever not loving her.

  My eyes swim and I take a deep breath in, counting to ten. I don’t want Maddie to worry any more than she already is, so I splash my face again, letting the water wash away any remaining tears. I leave the bathroom and head to the kitchen, where she is stacking the tiny dishwasher.

  ‘Thanks, Mads.’ I smile and reach for a glass of water.

  She looks at me as I shake out a pharmacy’s worth of multivitamins and supplements on the counter. I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking that I don’t need to take a rainbow spectrum of pills when I’m young, fit and healthy. She’s probably right, but keeping myself this way has been my protective blanket for so many years. Mum was only thirty-three when she died and Ivy only turned thirty-five last November. I swallow the pills one by one and Maddie stands beside me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and take a deep breath. I know it’s impossible, but I wish with everything I have that, when I open them again, everything will be different. I wish I would know what happened to Ivy, where she’d been for the last seven years and what she’d done. Where she worked and who her friends were. I wish I could pick up the phone and ask her. But when I open my eyes, the world is still the same.

  Chapter One

  JESS

  Fourteen years earlier

  I huff and lift my knee to hitch the cardboard box I’m carrying up into my arms. My fingers strain under its weight as I quickly shuffle past the tiny kitchen and into the second bedroom.

  ‘Bloody hell, Ivy! What have you got in here?’ I ask as I put it on the chest of drawers.

  Ivy laughs, dropping a duffel bag onto the floor next to me with a thud. ‘Um . . . candles, I think.’

  I open one of the flaps and, sure enough, the box is filled with candles in a rainbow of colours, assortment of sizes and variety of scents. She’s been collecting them since she was a kid, making Christmas and birthday presents an easy buy. I lift one of them out to double-check the label.

  ‘Jo Malone? Really?’ I sniff at it before reading the stylish label that tells me it’s pomegranate noir. ‘Isn’t this a bit expensive for you?’

  ‘About three hundred pounds worth of expensive, actually.’

  My eyes widen. There’s no way on earth my sister would ever spend three hundred pounds on a candle, no matter how much she loves them.

  ‘Noooo, I didn’t buy it,’ she says, clearly reading the look on my face before grinning. ‘It was a present from that guy.’

  I lift an eyebrow playfully. ‘You’ll have to be more specific. Which one?’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ she replies with a deadpan voice and rolls her black-lined eyes. ‘That older one who was obsessed with sushi. The one with the wax fetish. I told you, remember?’

  ‘Oh, him.’ I grimace. ‘Ew.’

  ‘This candle was his favourite.’ She takes it from me and puts it right in the centre of her windowsill as we both laugh.

  I know that, if she has anything to do with it, every available surface in our new flat will be adorned with the flickering of a candle flame.

  ‘What are you girls giggling about?’ Dad asks, bringing in the last of the boxes.

  He’s as fit as ever, despite the greying edges to his hair. We’ve been traipsing up and down three flights of stairs with boxes, bags and flat-pack furniture, and he’s barely even broken a sweat.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, catching Ivy’s gaze and trying not to snort with laughter. I’m pretty sure the idea of his youngest daughter pouring wax over the body of a naked man would add a few more grey hairs to his head.

  His tall, broad body almost fills the doorway as he shakes his head. ‘God help me with you two.’

  Ivy laughs. ‘He hasn’t helped you yet.’

  It’s a prayer he’s offered up more times than I can remember over the years, like when Ivy had snuck out to a party and I’d tried to convince him that her bed hadn’t been slept in because she’d slept in mine, and her evident – and first-ever – hangover was a tummy bug. Or the times we used to fight about who got to sit in the front passenger seat of the car. Honestly, I can’t imagine what it must be like to bring up two young girls as a single dad.

  ‘Remember that time we swapped your keys around?’ Ivy asks and I burst out laughing.

  It had been her idea to swap all his keyrings over and he’d spent a solid five minutes trying to get in while we’d sat on the stairs holding down giggles as we watched him through the mottled glass of the front door.

  ‘Hilarious.’ Dad tuts playfully.

  His face is a little fuller these days, as is his belly, and I look at him with a lump in my throat.

  ‘Are you going to be alright on your own?’ I ask.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he laughs. ‘I’ll finally be able to watch what I want in peace and get to sleep at night without waiting up to hear a key in the lock.’

  I playfully whack his arm. ‘We weren’t that bad.’

  ‘I know I wasn’t,’ Ivy says and the three of us fall about laughing because we all know that definitely isn’t true.

  I never understood my friends who’d itched to move out of their childhood home as teenagers. They’d wished for the freedom of getting away from overbearing parents, counting down the days until they could go to university or find a job and be able to pay their own rent. But it wasn’t like that for Ivy and me. Home was a haven. Dad was fun and kind and generous. He trusted us not to get ourselves into trouble, and he knew I’d be there to make sure we didn’t. He did the job of mum and dad, and we loved him for it. Now Ivy’s back from university, it’s a natural time for change. He’s got used to having more space and we’ve grown up. Mum left us a bit of money, so we put it towards a deposit. Our new flat is in Camberwell, so not a million miles away from our childhood home, but far enough to feel like we’re making a fresh start. And having a mortgage at twenty-two feels like the right step towards true adulthood.

  ‘Alright,’ he says, grabbing the jacket he’d hung on the doorknob. ‘I’ll nip down to B&Q so we can get on with your wardrobes.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’ Ivy grins and wraps her arms around his broad belly.

  He drops a kiss onto the top of her head and, as Ivy closes her eyes drinking in his attention, I can’t help but smile. She has a sense of naivety about her, whi
ch is probably why he’d asked me to help look after her after Mum died.

  ‘Nothing to thank me for. You’re the ones on cleaning duty.’ He grins. ‘I’ll fetch some fish and chips on the way back.’

  I consider telling him that I’ve decided to go vegan after reading a book that said eating any kind of animal product would basically kill me, but I decide to keep it to myself. I know he’s already worried about me getting enough calories and protein without his Jamaican breakfasts of eggs, bammy, dumplings and plantains.

  Ivy grins at me when Dad leaves. ‘We should throw a house-warming party.’

  I roll my eyes. ‘You’re so predictable. I knew you’d say that.’

  ‘Well, duh. That is what you do when you move into a new place, isn’t it?’

  She stands in front of me in a yellow Care Bears t-shirt that I guess is supposed to be ironic, paired with super low-rise jeans and a spiky choker around her throat. ‘Come on. It’ll be fun. Remember that time we went to the fair on Clapham Common? You were convinced it would be crap and you had a great time.’

  I raise my eyebrows. ‘You dragged me on the waltzer and I threw up behind a tree.’

  ‘But you had fun.’

  I sigh, but I can already see how this will play out. I’ll find reasons not to, because I’m the one who looks after the practical things. I had to be. Mum left such a huge gap behind and Dad worked all the hours he could to keep things going. Ivy would sleep with me when she was sick so Dad could rest between shifts, and I’d be the one who folded the laundry and made sure she handed in homework on time, along with finding time to do my own. My being responsible meant that she could be the one to come up with the so-called fun ideas, like going to Thorpe Park or, evidently, having a party.

  I look at her as she plays with the ring in her lip. Maybe us moving in together can be something of a fresh start.

  ‘Alright,’ I concede, but put my hand up before she can interrupt, ‘but only if it’s this weekend because we’re painting next week and the new sofa’s being delivered at the end of the month.’

  If we’re going to have a party, then it should at least be before there’s much that can be wrecked in the way of new furniture.