Sister

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Rosamund Lupton

Excerpt from Afterwards copyright © 2011 by Rosamund Lipton.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in paperback in Great Britain by Piatkus Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, a Hachette UK Company, London, in 2010. Published by arrangement with Piatkus, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group UK.

The verse on this page is from “In the Bleak Midwinter” by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894). The verse on this page is from “Sleep, Baby Sleep” (traditional).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lupton, Rosamund.

Sister : a novel / Rosamund Lupton. — 1st American ed.

p.   cm.

1. Sisters—Fiction.  2. Sisters—Death—Fiction.  3. Murder—

Investigation—Fiction.  I. Title.

PR6112.U77S57 2011

823′.92—dc22          2010025327

eISBN: 978-0-307-71653-8

Jacket design by Laura Duffy

Jacket photography by ML Harris/Getty Images

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

v3.1_r1

To my parents, Kit and Jane Orde-Powlett,

for their lifelong gift of encouragement.

And to Martin, my husband, with my love.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Acknowledgments

Excerpt from Afterwards

About the Author

“Where shall we see a better daughter or a kinder sister or a truer friend?”—Jane Austen, Emma“But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.”—Shakespeare, Sonnet 5

1

sunday evening

Dearest Tess,

I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment, so I could hold your hand, look at your face, listen to your voice. How can touching and seeing and hearing—all those sensory receptors and optic nerves and vibrating eardrums—be substituted by a letter? But we’ve managed to use words as go-betweens before, haven’t we? When I went off to boarding school and we had to replace games and laughter and low-voiced confidences for letters to each other. I can’t remember what I said in my first letter, just that I used a jigsaw, broken up, to avoid the prying eyes of my house mistress. (I guessed correctly that her jigsaw-making inner child had left years ago.) But I remember word for word your seven-year-old reply to my fragmented homesickness and that your writing was invisible until I shone a flashlight onto the paper. Ever since, kindness has smelled of lemons.

The journalists would like that little story, marking me out as a kind of lemon-juice detective even as a child and showing how close we have always been as sisters. They’re outside your flat now, actually, with their camera crews and sound technicians (faces sweaty, jackets grimy, cables trailing down the steps and getting tangled up in the railings). Yes, that was a little throwaway, but how else to tell you? I’m not sure what you’ll make of becoming a celebrity, of sorts, but suspect you’ll find it a little funny. Ha-ha funny and weird funny. I can only find it weird funny, but then I’ve never shared your sense of humor, have I?

“But you’ve already been suspended once, it’s serious,” I said. “Next time you’ll be expelled for definite and Mum’s got enough on her plate.”

You’d been caught smuggling your rabbit into school. I was so very much the older sister.