Ready or Not by Rachel Thomas Page A

correct.
                  The only thing, the only person, Kate had left to remind her of her brother since he disappeared whilst playing hide and seek all those years ago, was now also gone. Her father, so like her brother Daniel in so many ways and so different in a hundred more, had died eighteen months earlier, suddenly and without warning. He had suffered an asthma attack, alone in the house where she had grown up. Kate and her father, Patrick, had not been speaking at the time, after a long, drawn out argument over his decision to move away. He’d been found by neighbours and Kate would never forgive herself.
                  He’d been planning on going to Ireland; to stay with family there for a while until he found somewhere of his own. He had moved from there at the age of five – had never really known Ireland as home – but he suddenly felt that he belonged there, and was ready to give up his life in Wales. The news had been a bombshell. What hurt Kate the most was that her father had said he had nothing to stay for: he had lost his son, lost his wife; there was nothing to look forward to, nothing to keep him there. 
                  But what about her?
                  How else had he expected her to react? His words were cutting and, though she knew her father was miserable and depressed, she couldn’t help but feel that he was doing this to spite her, or jolt her into changing her own life to persuade him to stay. She was hurt and shocked and though she knew her father had been unhappy for years, the selfish part of her was the loudest, screaming ‘what about me?’  
                  ‘You’re almost thirty seven years old,’ he had said, his voice cold and detached. ‘You have your own life. Let me have what’s left of mine.’
                  Though her work had for years prevented her from spending as much time with him as she would have liked, Kate couldn’t bear the thought of her father not being there when she needed him. There was no one else she could talk to about the past, though the further away from her mother’s death they had got, the less her father had wanted to talk about her. Eventually, it was almost as though she had never existed at all and an invisible wall was built around her, separating the memory of her from the present.
                  The same was to be said for her brother. There was an invisible list of things they didn’t talk about, with Daniel and her mother forming its mainframe. The mention of her brother’s name made her father flinch and he would change the subject, leave the room; anything to avoid having to talk about him, and the absence of him. He had never forgiven himself, Kate told herself. But by not allowing her to talk about Daniel, her father distanced her from her missing brother. And she didn’t want to be distanced from him. She needed to remember him.
    It was as though by refusing to say his name, her father could pretend he had never really existed at all.
                  She couldn’t bear the thought that her father had died alone. She carried the guilt of his death with her like an invisible second skin and it was tightening its grip on her the more she fought against it. She couldn’t stand the fact that they had not been speaking; that she had never had the chance to say goodbye. Kate had tried forgiving herself for not being there. It hadn’t worked. 
                  Already it was becoming harder to picture her father. Occasionally she would remember his face vividly, as though in a confusing dream in which even on awakening, for a moment everything looked and sounded real, but these times were brief and infrequent and his face would fade until the details of it disappeared.
                  Kate needed to remember. Without the memory of her father, how would she recognise Daniel when she found