PART 1
We need a million dollars.
My mother said it standing in the middle of my apartment as though nineteen years had not happened.
She said: and you're going to give it to us, because Celestine is still your sister.
Those were the first words Leonora had said to me in almost two decades.
No apology. No hello. Not even how have you been.
I was thirty-five, standing by the windows with the rain coming down the glass, and I had let them up because my concierge rang me and said there was a couple downstairs saying they were my parents, and I wanted to see what that felt like.
My father put a thick folder down on the coffee table.
He said: Celestine made a mistake. If the money's replaced before the audit next week, it can be handled quietly.
I looked at the folder. Then at him.
I said: and why would I be the one to fix it?
And my mother gave a little laugh with nothing in it, and said:
Because you owe this family.
I stood there for a second.
Then I looked down at my left leg.
The titanium shows below the hem of my trousers. It always does. That is a choice I made a long time ago and I have not changed it for boardrooms, for photographs, or for anybody.
I tapped it. Twice. With two fingers.
I said: I owe you?
The colour went out of her face.
I was ten when they found the cancer in that leg. It was aggressive and it was fast and within a few weeks they took it above the knee.
I remember waking up in that room afterwards. The light was wrong. Somebody was talking in the corridor.
I put my hand under the blanket.
And then I cried for my mother, the way you do when you are ten.
PART 2
When I was sixteen they hired a photographer for a formal family portrait.
I was trying to cross the living room quietly, out of the way, and the tip of my crutch slipped on the polished floor.
A glass of red wine went over and across my mother's white cashmere rug.
I hit the floor hard. My hip was black for a fortnight.
My father never asked whether I was hurt.
He went into the kitchen and came back carrying a black rubbish bag and pushed it against my chest.
