Would you betray your friends if it meant resolving your greatest anguish?


Genre: Literary fiction. 108,500 words.

 

 

 

Toby was born fourteen and a bit months before me but while the family awaited my arrival, shit happened. The Fallows family tree had already been ringbarked when I joined the world and it took a couple of years for it to die completely. The fault was mine, I convinced myself. Given the timing, no other cause made sense, the me-child believed. To separate siblings so close in age compounded the tragedy. Toby went with our mother, from what I understood she was a mystical woman of means; me with Dad, a man who struggled with single-parenting and found life bewildering. Did our parents believe Toby and I would mimic the malice that had divided them and so deny us a bond of our own? I once overheard Dad tell an acquaintance that I had no siblings. It was the moment I learned how to become grey.