Finaly I find myself reduced to blackmail: only the threat of us al turning up at Dave’s, suitcases in hand, wil force her to part with the cash. If I try reminding her that although this was the initial set-up when our father left, the reality now is very different, she starts screaming about her right to a life too. This then leads to the usual tirade about how she works fourteen-hour days just to keep a roof over our heads, that al she asks of me is that I look after my siblings for a few hours after school each day. I know she says this out of drunken fury, but I also know it’s true: this is why she has continued resenting me, far more than the others, al my life. But this only provokes her further, prompting the cheap-shot reminder that she would never have married our father had she not accidentaly got pregnant with me. I point out that our father’s desertion does not somehow magicaly give her the right to desert us too. Reminding her that she didn’t have three younger siblings to care for is her cue to go on about how she never wanted children in the first place, how she only had us to please our father, how he’d wanted another and another until, tiring of us al, he’d run off to start anew with someone else. Every time I force her to part with some money for the basics – food, bils, new clothes, school things – she starts yeling about how she left school and started work at sixteen, moved out and asked her parents for nothing. Our mother has already made her choice – but now I’m about to turn eighteen and legaly become an adult I fear she may cut us off completely in a final bid to get that ring on her finger. As the novel careens toward an explosive and shocking finale, only one thing is certain: a love this devastating has no happy ending.Our mother has been desperate to marry Dave from the moment she set eyes on him, yet Dave, even with his divorce now finalized, has not proposed, clearly not prepared to take on the extra baggage of another large family. And yet, they cannot stop what feels so incredibly right.
They know their relationship is wrong and cannot possibly continue. Their clandestine romance quickly blooms into deep, desperate love. So close, in fact, that they have fallen in love.
And the stress of their lives-and the way they understand each other so completely-has also brought them closer than two siblings would ordinarily be. As defacto parents to the little ones, Lochan and Maya have had to grow up fast. Together they have stepped in for their alcoholic, wayward mother to take care of their three younger siblings.
Seventeen-year-old Lochan and sixteen-year-old Maya have always felt more like friends than siblings. He is seventeen gorgeous and on the brink of a bright future.
She is pretty and talented – sweet sixteen and never been kissed.
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