Pandora’s Box
An emotional and heart-warming novel, perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes, Liane Moriarty and Jodi Picoult.Rachel Wetherby has just been told the news no mother should ever have to hear. Her daughter, Shelley, has a terminal illness.Convincing her mum that she’d like to spend her last birthday in Cornwall, a place of so many happy memories, Shelley decides to make every moment count. Because unknown to Rachel, Shelley is juggling a secret romance with planning her own death.But when she opens a box left by her grandmother, Shelley discovers a past she never knew existed. It’s a past that will make her laugh and cry in equal measure. And it will help Shelley and her mother find the joy in every moment that she has left . . .
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GISELLE GREEN
Pandora’s Box
AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008
Copyright © Giselle Green 2008
Giselle Green asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9781847560674
Ebook Edition © 2008 ISBN: 9780007329007 Version: 2015-01-07
To dearest Jonathan, who is a hope and inspiration to us all.
Contents
Dedication
When at last I saw her fall, it was exactly as I had imagined it would be. Her face was a white flash of shock, eyes wide open and full of surprise. I watched her hair riding up in tumultuous curls behind her, the light filtering through every strand, all in slow motion like some scene from a film where they slow everything down to savour every last agonising detail.
All the while that she fell I had the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the knowing that, oh god, I did that. It’s my fault. I should never have let her go. I could have saved her but I didn’t. I can’t believe that I didn’t. And the shocked, horrified part of me that had let her go turned on the bit of me that had wanted her to fall all along.
You needed to be free of all this. How many times have you thought that? You needed her to fall so that you could be free, didn’t you, Rachel? So you just let it happen. By the sins of our commission and omission…
You were responsible for her safety and her wellbeing and you knew this was going to happen and you just let it.
And I could not deny it.
How many nights had I lain awake fantasising about just such a scenario, my escape route from the prison that my life had so long ago become? Would it have made any difference if I had not succumbed to temptation and looked inside Pandora’s box? I really cannot say. I’m feeling too numb now. My world has crumbled, everything has gone. I don’t know anything at all any more.
And so she fell and I did nothing. And why? Because although I loved her, as long as we were yoked together I could never be free.
Pandora’s box arrives on a grey Saturday in March, wet on its cardboard bottom where the postwoman has laid it down in a puddle outside our front door. My first thought is: I told my mother not to send it. I know what’s in it and I don’t want it.
I’m not even going to open it.
The box has ‘This will cheer you up’ scrawled in my mother’s handwriting along the top. But I know that it won’t. My mother, Pandora—who is emigrating to Sydney with her new ‘boyfriend’—has already told me exactly what she is sending:
‘Just some of your childhood things I’ve been holding on to. All your stuff, you know. Your school certificates and your medals and some old letters I kept. Photos of you and Liliana doing your dancing. God, what promise you two girls once showed!’ she had sniffed, remembering. She didn’t have to spell it out to me that we’d never lived up to that promise. ‘But there’s nothing I can really take with me all that way.’
Of course she can’t and, fair enough, I thought, I am forty-two after all. I can’t expect Mum to hang on to all my childhood paraphernalia forever.
I just wish she’d chucked it out herself instead of sending it on to me. There is something disquieting about having this stuff turn up at my door this morning; something I can’t put my finger on. I look at the box. It’s 7.45 a.m. and the children aren’t even up yet. The hallway is still dark when I pad through to the kitchen with the box, hoping for a tiny bit more light. The fact that she’s sent this to me…it’s as if
