How to Fall Read Online Free PDF

that.’
    I wasn’t surprised to hear it. Will had been looking for something when he talked to me, something he had been missing. And I had a fairly shrewd idea that I had failed to provide it.
    ‘You said it was because of Freya, but Will stopped coming round
before
she—’ Petra stopped short of saying the next word.
Died
.
    Her brother shook his head. ‘You’re deluded. He was always in our house.’ To me, he said, ‘We used to have an open-door policy. All sorts of waifs and strays catered for, entertained and sheltered, for very reasonable rates. But then, after what happened, Mum didn’t want other people around much.’
    ‘I can imagine.’
    ‘Nope. You can’t.’ He leaned back in his chair, seeming to be relaxed despite the subject under discussion. ‘Don’t worry. Things are better now.’
    ‘Much better.’ Petra rubbed a wet finger across the plate to pick up the last traces of chocolate. ‘Almost normal. Except that Will hasn’t come back yet.’
    ‘I wouldn’t have thought he qualified as a waif or a stray. He seemed pretty self-possessed to me.’
    ‘He’s a mate,’ Hugo said shortly, throwing a glare in Petra’s direction that stopped her from saying whatever she had been about to. ‘He’s part of the family.’
    Like me, I thought. But his membership was by invitation. And mine could be revoked if my mother and their mother didn’t start getting on again. The stakes were high; I could sort of see why Mum was hiding in her bedroom rather than getting on with seeing her twin.
    Petra bit her lip. ‘You mustn’t think we’ve forgotten about Freya just because things are getting back to normal.’
    ‘Of course I don’t.’ I was genuinely shocked at the idea.
    ‘It’s just that you can’t stop living because someone you love dies.’
    ‘And it’s not what Freya would have wanted.’ Hugo’s face was expressionless. ‘If she’d stopped to think about the rest of us for a second before she did her swan-dive off the edge of the cliff.’
    ‘Hugo!’
    I ignored Petra’s protest. Hugo, for one, wasn’t going to keel over if I talked about his sister, and I was going to take advantage of that. ‘So you think it was deliberate?’
    ‘I don’t know. No one knows. But that’s what they say.’
    ‘Do they? Why would she have wanted to kill herself?’
    ‘She didn’t have a reason,’ Petra said. ‘She didn’t do it deliberately. She just fell.’
    ‘She had no reason to be there in the first place. Not at that time of night.’ Hugo sighed. ‘Don’t get into the middle of this discussion if you know what’s good for you, Jess. It goes round and round and never stops. We just have the questions. Freya was the one with the answers, and she’s not much into talking these days.’
    ‘I don’t want to upset anyone.’ I was feeling uncomfortable again, upset by the misery in Petra’s eyes when she talked about her sister, and Hugo’s brittle composure that was just about keeping the lid on simmering rage, as far as I could see. ‘I’m sorry for asking about it. I just wanted to know.’
    ‘You’re not the only one.’ Hugo gave me a rueful smile. ‘We’re all in the dark. Except Freya, who’s bathing in perpetual light somewhere beyond the third rainbow on the left.’
    ‘No one knows what happened,’ Petra said. ‘Not for sure.’
    ‘That’s the hardest part, especially for Mum and Dad. Everyone assumed she’d killed herself. They made out that she’d been unhappy and no one had noticed, which made Mum miserable. Like she’d neglected her duty.’
    ‘You didn’t think she’d been unhappy.’
    ‘No. The opposite.’ Hugo looked very slightly shamefaced. ‘But I don’t think I’d have noticed unless she’d been seriously upset. I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about how she was feeling.’
    ‘She was fine, though.’ Petra patted his arm. ‘There was nothing to notice. She was just the same as normal. Except – except that I thought she