She shrieked in pain as the knife sliced through her finger once more, deeper than before. Blood spurted across the kitchen counter and arced over the vegetables. Hissing and swearing under her breath, she wrapped the nearest piece of cloth, which happened to be one of her favourite scarves, around the cut. On the tabletop her Samsung cellphone began to buzz and vibrate like an irritating electronic animal, lifting and clattering back against the marble in miniature convulsions. With one hand she picked it up, pressed a button and balanced it against an ear with a shoulder.
* * *
In the front garden, Serena Fourie looked through the kitchen window and watched her mother on a call. A cascade of blonde hair shrouded the cellphone, and both hands were busy with something unseen. Serena didn’t need to be within earshot to know who was calling and what the call was about. It was almost the middle of the day, and her mother, the workaholic, was at home. She watched her posture change almost immediately; her fine-boned, slender frame, which none of them had inherited, stiffened and her face reddened as her head snapped up, nearly causing her to drop the phone. She uttered what looked like sharp words into it and turned her back to the window.
“Boo.” Serena jumped as two fingers poked her in the sides.
“Cut it out,” she said to her sister, without turning around. Her voice came sharper than intended, but she couldn’t help it. Every word and every movement would be as barbed and dangerous today as it had been for over a month. By the look of things, the two likeliest contenders for an unnecessary brawl were already squaring off. They’d held off longer than last year, not bashing antlers until the actual day. She wondered if that was good or bad.
“That means you’re jealous, if you jump when people poke you,” Rosie giggled, unperturbed, as she put her arms around her from the back. “Or having sex.”
Rosie leaned into her neck, and Serena caught the smell of something sweet with peanuts in it on her breath as she said the illicit words. Quietly they both watched their mother, breathing almost in unison. In the kitchen, Carina angrily cut the call and tossed the phone away from her, then began pointlessly shifting items around on the counter.
“What’s she doing?”
“Making stew for supper.” It was eleven-thirty in the morning.
“Was that Dad?” Rosie whispered.
Serena nodded.
Another pause. Then: “What’s the date today?”
Sighing, Serena disentangled herself and spun around. The exasperated look she shot said, You know what day it is today. The day Sean had begun what would prove to be the final bout of treatment for leukaemia. They all knew, had been raised to know and remember every landmark of their brother’s short life.
Rosie looked blank for a few seconds, and then the look that dawned on her said, Oh. Serena shook her head. Trust Rosie.
“I won’t be here for it, though. Supper, I mean.” Serena hefted a gym bag of clean laundry. “Got cell group tonight. Going back to campus.”
“Lemme come with you.”
The sound of a car pulling up interrupted them. It parked outside the gate, and a young man rose tentatively out of the driver’s seat and craned his neck over the gate. His hopeful eyes met those of his sisters. Serena sadly shook her head in response, and Lucas slumped back behind the wheel and drove off. She walked through the gate to her own car, fighting the urge to look back at Rosie standing lonely on the lawn, biting her nails and looking lost.
Chapter Three
Vee hung her legs out of the Toyota Corolla and polished off a Top Red apple. As lunches went, fatty steak rolls and unwashed fruit weren’t the best she could do, but it worked on the move.
“On the move” sounded great, considering how stagnant her career had become. The shocking part was she hadn’t really cared. Her recent blackouts told of a subconscious dissatisfaction, but her subconscious wasn’t really her problem if it didn’t speak up. True, making its presence felt by sending her into rapturous torture with no provocation at the oddest times was not ideal, but that simply meant there’d have to be some new ground rules.
Reminded of one, Vee popped a foil tab of Cipralex and swallowed the pill. Since the plan of keeping specialist appointments was canned – “psychiatrist” sounded so wrong and “therapist” far worse – it came down to medication for a so-called anxiety disorder. It was either a professional or the pills, not both. Screw it, she’d take the gamble. After watching the bottom fall out of her life, what else was there to lose? Wait and see was the new catch phrase.
She flipped through a paperback, but soon her mind wandered. She loved being the only investigative journalist on the team, because it spelled solo missions. Most people couldn’t handle having nothing but their own thoughts to keep those long hours from crushing their skulls in. Add to that the drudgery of fact-finding, wading through verbal muck and quadruple-checking copy to make a story look great beneath a by-line, and Vee was regarded with both awe and pity.
Hard to admit, but she was now an investigator in name only. Lately, guiding readers through the maze of the make-up industry and the scam of knock-off labels was the raciest her writing had been. Pumping out the last piece of junky prose under a “human interest” heading had made her snap. With her skills stretched across two sister publications and their associated bimonthly advertorial, she’d been snapping internally for some time.
Chewing thoughtfully on the apple core, Vee reflected on the scene two days earlier, when she’d finally marched into the main office to see the editor, proposal in hand and the toughest look of resolve she could muster.
After two years working with and for Portia Kruger, she still found the editor an enigma. Portia’s appeal was also her Achilles heel: she was gorgeous, intelligent and a prima donna, the last quality lending a superhuman ability to overestimate herself in the first two, often rendering her incomprehensible at the worst of times and insufferable at the best. To add insult to injury, she had money. Modelling since the age of ten and an Oxford degree made her marketable. An editorship at thirty, albeit largely acquired through her father’s connections and one that carried little clout in the industry, stepped her up to overbearing. As far as everyone was concerned, being at the helm of Urban magazine was as much a learning experience for Portia as it was for the staff. In private, they freely tittered that she was no more than a seat-warmer for a discreet private venture her old man kept alive to diversify his business portfolio. In public, they jumped like fleas at her command because she was, after all, the “real” boss’s daughter.
Vee had knocked on Portia’s door and entered in one smooth movement. It had become clear early on that Kruger was one who responded well to the mythical creature that was “authority”. If you came confident of what you wanted and fully prepared to fight for it, chances were pretty good of wrangling a tenth of what you’d expected when the dust cleared. The fickle winds of office gossip whispered that Portia was a little intimidated by Vee. Being an underpaid subordinate, even one with a top-class degree in journalism and media from Columbia University, wasn’t much to go on. All the same, Vee took the leverage where she could get it.
“I read your proposal last night,” Portia said, shuffling files. Most likely they had nothing to do with the piece. You had to hand it to Portia in certain areas. If she’d devoted a fraction of her precious time and mental agility to the proposal, it would be memorised back to front.
“It was interesting . . . really interesting.” Her cinnamon hair, usually wild and curly in the deliberately