All That’s Left
Copyright © 2019 by Emma Doherty
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Author Note
To my lovely American and International readers,
Izzy is British and I have therefore used British spellings and grammar which sometimes differ slightly to American (and other countries’) spellings. I hope you understand.
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Other Books
Acknowledgments
The plane touches down on the tarmac and I swear some strange people actually cheer, like they were expecting it to go down or something. I look around and stretch out my body, easing my muscles as the pilot moves the aircraft into position by the terminal. The seatbelt sign is turned off and the people around me immediately start gathering their belongings, checking under their seats to see if they’ve forgotten anything whilst I stifle a yawn. I reach down and pick up my bag, rummaging around in the bottom until I find my phone. I pull it out and power it on. It takes a couple of minutes, but the only message waiting for me is one from my phone provider in the UK telling me I can use my phone abroad. The flight from London to Houston took over ten hours, but I don’t have any other messages waiting—no emails, no texts, no social media posts or notifications. I shouldn’t be surprised, really. I burnt most of my bridges before my mother died, and for those friends who did stick around…well, my behaviour over the last eight months drove them away.
I yawn. I should be tired; I haven’t slept at all, but then I’m used to that now. It’s been months since I’ve been able to sleep properly. It’s certainly not because I’ve been uncomfortable on the flight. I’m sat in first class and have been waited on hand and foot since I stepped on board. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I got to check-in and was told I’d been booked a first-class ticket. That’s my father all over. God forbid his daughter fly economy. Him booking me a first-class ticket is his version of blood money.
Everyone around me is standing and waiting to file off the plane, but I stay seated as they start to exit and instead stare out the window, watching the airport workers take the luggage into the portal. Only when the plane is practically empty and I catch the cabin crew staring at me do I stand, gather my things, and move off. I follow the crowd of people making their way towards passport control and reach into my bag for mine. My American passport sits next to my British one, confirming my dual citizenship. I pull out the American passport, which I haven’t used in years, and wait in turn to show it to the woman at the desk, who barely glances in my direction. “Welcome home,” she tells me.
Home.
America isn’t my home. It never has been.
I carry on through the airport and look out for the signs for baggage collection then join the people waiting for their luggage to come out. I’d be happy to wait forever for it to appear, to avoid having to walk through arrivals, but they’re pretty prompt and I soon manage to haul my two large cases off the conveyer belt. I spot a vending machine and buy a bottle of water then head into the female bathroom to splash some cold water on my face. My complexion is tired, and there are bags under my eyes from my lack of sleep. I look exhausted. I feel exhausted.
Finally, when I can’t stall any more, I make my way out of the bathroom. The crowd has dispersed since most passengers from my flight have already passed through, and I pull my cases along behind me, heading towards arrivals. Once I’ve passed through the final gates, I spot the usual crowd that’s stood by the exit waiting for their loved ones to return, and I glance around, looking for a sign with my name on it and the driver Casey, my dad’s executive assistant, said would be waiting for me. I don’t see any sign, and it’s almost a relief that I don’t have to deal with this yet. I step through the crowd and start looking around for the exit.
I need some air. I need to pull myself together and compose myself now that I’m here.
Nine months—that’s all I have to get through. Nine months until I turn 18 and can catch a one-way flight out of here, away from them.
I’m almost at the exit when I spot him. He’s stood to the right by a coffee cart with a look I can’t decipher on his face, his gaze fixed on me. I turn fully to face him, and when he realises I’ve spotted him, it triggers him into motion. He steps away from the cart and comes towards me, lifting a hand hesitantly in greeting, and I can’t help it—I can’t help the feeling of contempt I’ve come to associate with him over the last few years, and it washes over me.
I dislike Ethan almost as much as I dislike myself right now.
“Hi.”
I don’t respond. I just look back at him. Strangely, he seems older than he did at the start of summer, broader, even though it’s only been a couple of months. He turned up unannounced at the beginning of his summer break, expecting a welcome party or something, but he didn’t stay long. After a few days, he got the message that I didn’t have any need for him to be there, that I wasn’t about to sit around and talk about my feelings, and he returned home to America within the week. I haven’t spoken to him since.
“You okay?” he asks. I shrug my shoulders because really, what can I say to that? No. No I’m not okay. I’ve been forced to move across the globe because my father, who I haven’t had more than a twenty-minute conversation with in two years, has decided I’m embarrassing him in London and need to come back to America where I can be given some proper discipline. Or, more to the point, he wants me back in the US and in the local high school where they’ll bend to his will and he won’t have teachers and interfering adults he can’t sweet-talk bothering him from the UK with news of me.
“Izzy?”
“I’m fine,” I mutter.
That’s what I say when anyone asks me how I am. Friends, teachers, my mum’s friends—anyone who asks hears the same response. Because I am fine. I realised the minute my mother told me her cancer was terminal that I would have to be fine on my own. She was the only person in the world I could rely on, and now she’s gone.
I can tell he doesn’t buy that I’m fine for a second, but he doesn’t push me on it. My eyes fall from his face because I don’t like the intense look he’s giving me, like he’s trying to figure out some deeper meaning, and instead I take in his attire. He’s wearing long navy sport shorts with a white t-shirt that highlights his tan, an
d a navy baseball cap sits backwards on his head, covering his shaggy blond hair, which has only gotten lighter in the sun since I last saw him in June. He looks like the perfect all-American boy.
“Dad couldn’t come,” he tells me. His accent is back to full-on Yank. When he was in London, his accent changed slightly and he picked up a bit of British twang. It used to happen to me too, when I came to America, like my voice remembered and adapted to the accent I had as a young girl. “He’s out of town on business. I think Casey said Miami.”
I nod. This doesn’t surprise me. Why should it? I’m only his only daughter who he’s forced to come over here. Why should he bother to meet me at the airport? Or even be in the same state as me?
I still don’t say anything, but Ethan’s eyes stay focused on me, like I’ve changed, like he’s trying to memorise my face and the differences he’s finding there. “Your hair’s gotten lighter,” he says. “Must have been a hot summer in London.” It was. Annoyingly, the sun’s highlighted my hair in a similar fashion to his. When I saw him at our mum’s funeral, it made me so angry how alike we looked that I went to a hair salon the next day and dyed it a dark brown because I didn’t want to play the perfect twin children. I tried to keep up with it, but it just wasn’t a priority to keep going back to the hairdresser, and when my mum’s best friend saw me after a couple of months, he marched me straight back to the salon and made them dye it back to my natural colour. It took them hours to get it back to what it used to be, but eventually it was close enough, and then the London sun did the rest of the work over the summer.
Even I can tell how alike we’ve become. We’ve always looked the same, always been similar, but it seems to have gotten more so; he’s the male version of me. Not surprising, really, considering he’s my twin. We have the same cerulean eyes and the same straight nose. We’re both tall, although he totally dwarfs me now. He must be six foot two easy, towering over my five foot nine. There was never any doubt we were going to be tall with our parents. My dad is around the same height as Ethan, and my mum was even taller than me, tall enough to model, to walk in catwalk shows all around the world. For six short months when she was seventeen, that’s exactly what she did—until she met my dad and he got his claws into her. She was eighteen when she married him, nineteen when she had us. That seems insane to me now; she was so, so young.
“How was your flight? It’s pretty long, huh?” he asks, trying unsuccessfully to make this situation normal, as if this is any other conversation between siblings.
It’s not. We haven’t had a normal conversation since we were twelve years old and he picked here, since he chose living here over me and my mum.
“The flight?” he continues, not letting it drop, and I sigh in irritation. I have no time for small talk between us. Now that I’m here, all I want to do is go to bed.
“It was fine,” I bite out, giving him my standard response. Everything is fine to me these days. The food is fine, my clothes are fine, my studies are fine, my health is fine. I’m fine.
I shift my eyes away from him and stare at the coffee stand behind him. He lets out a small sigh of annoyance, like I’m an irritating little kid who’s wearing his patience thin. “Okay. So let’s go,” he tells me, reaching for one of my suitcases. I pull it away from his reach, not caring how petulant it makes me. I don’t need anyone’s help, and I especially don’t need his. He wasn’t there when I needed him. When I needed him the most, he was on the other side of the world and didn’t answer his phone. And he wasn’t there before, when she started to decline. When she was starting to show signs of being sick and I missed it. When I didn’t pick up on her sudden weight loss and I didn’t pester her to go to the doctor when I should have done. He wasn’t there to help me pick up on that. In fact, he hasn’t been there for the last five years, and I’m not about to start needing him now.
His jaw tenses at my reaction, but he doesn’t say anything, instead turning abruptly and leading me out of the airport and out to the car park. He heads towards a shiny new Range Rover, and I slow down, my eyes taking in the vehicle. It looks like it cost more than what my mother and I lived off in a year, and I hate him in this moment. I hate that just because my dad has more money than God, my brother picked that over us, over my kind, loving, funny mother who was devastated when he chose to live over here.
He unlocks the car and watches me try to lift the heavy cases into the boot. After a minute of me trying to use my limited arm strength to haul both cases—which hold what feels like all my worldly possessions—he rolls his eyes and takes a case from my hands, throwing it into the back with ease before doing the same with the next one.
I don’t bother to thank him and instead turn and slide into the passenger seat. He climbs into the driver’s seat and puts the key in the ignition, but he doesn’t turn the car on. He glances over at me like he wants to say something but then turns away. After another minute, he turns back to me. “I didn’t think you’d get on this flight either.”
I look back at him. I’ve been booked on five flights over the last two weeks. It was only when my father actually bothered to send me an email himself saying if I didn’t get on the next one he would send someone over to escort me to the States personally that I finally realised I couldn’t put it off any longer. I know my father; he doesn’t care enough to come collect me himself, but he does care about what people think about him and doesn’t want it to look like he can’t control his daughter.
“Casey emailed me to tell me you checked in,” he continues. “That’s how I knew you’d be here. I told her I’d come get you rather than her sending a driver.”
Casey. We’ve never met, but I’ve spoken to her countless times over the last couple of years. She’s the one who arranges my flights and checks if I need anything. I’m pretty sure it’s her who’s been sending my birthday and Christmas presents too. If my dad’s anything like he is with me with Ethan, I’m guessing Ethan’s gotten to know Casey pretty well too.
I still don’t say anything as my brother awkwardly clears his throat. “I’m glad you’re here.” He hesitates. “I’m glad you’re home.”
I can’t help it—I scoff at his words before turning to look out the windshield. “This isn’t my home,” I tell him flatly. “Texas is never going to be my home.”
It takes almost three hours before we pull off the ginormous five-lane motorway filled with trucks and lorries bigger than I’ve ever seen back home. The sight of all the huge vehicles on such a busy road makes me nervous, but Ethan handles his SUV with ease, slipping in and out of cars and ensuring we get to our destination as quickly as possible. It’s insane to me that he’s this confident and good at driving at seventeen. None of my friends back home can drive; we don’t need to.
He pulls off at an exit, and eventually the noise of the roads starts to fade. Eventually the areas we’re driving through become less and less urban, and suddenly we’re passing field after field of Texas crops, only seeing the odd lone house as we get closer to the place my father and Ethan call home: Kellan, Texas.
I lived here for the first two years of my life but have only been back once since then. It was back when I was eight and my father made me visit my grandparents. They had the biggest house I’d ever seen and immediately told me off for not dressing like a proper girl. Then they made me and Ethan sit down for hours whilst they spoke to my father, and when Ethan was excused to go play outside, I was told I was a little girl and had to stay inside. I’ve not been back since. The next time my father suggested a visit was after my mother had divorced him, and I kicked up such a fuss that my mother stepped in and refused to make me go. Even though this is where my father has kept his house for the last five years, in his hometown where people can see exactly how wealthy he is, he’s barely ever here himself. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to get away with not visiting him here. I’ve always just met him somewhere else, in New York, Paris, or London—wherever he happens to be. That might sound exciting and glamour
ous to some, but the reality is that I’ve barely seen my father in years.
We’ve gotten into the routine of only seeing each other once or twice a year. He visits London about every six months or so but doesn’t let me know he’s there unless it’s been a while since he’s seen me. It’s not unusual for me to see online that he’s made an appearance at an event in the city or out on a date with whomever his latest fling is when he hasn’t even told me he was in town. But, when he decides it’s beneficial to his image, he’ll arrange for a car to pick me up for dinner, take me for a fancy meal in Mayfair, and have me returned to my mum’s within two hours, because really, we have nothing to say to each other. The only time I’ve visited him in the States over the last couple of years was when I was fourteen and he was having a hotel opening. He wanted to look like a family man, so he paid for Ethan and me to come to New York. I flat-out refused, so he paid for Kristen, my best friend for years, to come too. We were fourteen and in awe of everything we saw there. Ethan only came in for the opening of the hotel and then had to get back for football camp, but we stayed for a week and only had to see my dad twice, once for dinner and then once at the hotel opening. I’ll always remember that trip. Kristen and I fell in love with New York, and I imagined that one day I would live there. The city seemed like magic to me, and I always thought if I did one day want to live in the US, I’d pick New York. I never thought I’d end up having to live in Texas.
Eventually we pass a sign that welcomes us to Kellan, and after a few minutes, streets of houses appear, painted white with white picket fences and the American flag proudly flying in the driveway. I stare at it all, my mind churning. The sun’s starting to go down, and there’s a glow cast over the houses as the sun starts to turn pink in the background. Any other time I’d have to admit that it’s spectacular, the fields highlighted by the sunset, but I can’t today. Today I barely notice it. It’s like I’m in a trance, like I’m in my brother’s car being driven to my new home, but not really. Really, my mind is elsewhere. My mind is permanently elsewhere these days.
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