The Flask

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Acknowledgments

Also by Nicky Singer

Copyright

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

I find the flask the day the twins are born, so I think of these things as joined, as the twins are joined.

The flask is in the desk, though it is hidden at first, just as the desk itself is hidden, shrouded inside the word bureau – which is what my gran calls this lump of furniture that arrives in my room. I hate the desk. I hate the bureau. It is a solid, everyday reminder that my aunt Edie is dead.

Aunt Edie isn’t – wasn’t – my real aunt, she was my great-aunt, so of course she must have been old.

“Ancient,” says my friend Zoe. “Over sixty.”

Old and small and wrinkled, with skin as dry as paper.

No.

Her bright blue eyes gone milky with age.

No. No!

My aunt Edie blazed.

At the bottom of her garden there was a rockery in which she grew those tiny flowers that keep themselves closed up tight, refusing to unfurl until the sun comes out. They could be closed up for hours, for days, and then suddenly burst into life, showing their dark little hearts and their delicate white petals with the vivid pink tips. That’s what I sometimes thought about Aunt Edie and me. That I was the plant all curled up and she was the blazing sun. That she, and only she, could open up my secret heart.

A week after her death, I find myself standing by that rockery staring at the bare earth.

“Looking for the mesembryanthemums?” says Si. Si’s my stepfather and he’s good with long words.

I say nothing.

“They’re annuals, those flowers, the ones you used to like. Don’t think she had the chance to plant any this year.”