Page 144 - My Home on the Earth

do? Squeeze money out of your sister to make up for her having a better life than you? Does she suspect anything?’
Melanie had turned away from him to gaze out of the window. ‘You don’t know what it was like for me and you’ll never understand the humiliation I felt in Nestonbrook.’
While her sister was away, she’d considered asking Jake to stay in the apartment. It sounded like a good idea until one or two of the residents gave her odd looks when they met going up or down the service staircase with their rubbish. The elderly man who used to speak to her at the bus stop ignored her. Louisa scoffed when Melanie mentioned it and said she was being overly sensitive. As if that wasn’t enough, Jake refused to speak to her when she’d tapped on the shed door.
When she left him alone in Lincolnshire, he’d searched their place from top to bottom for clues that might tell him about his dad. He found nothing until he dropped the rubbish bin on Friday morning. Before she’d left, his mum had torn up sheets of paper, so he collected every scrap and hid the pieces at the bottom of his rucksack.
One morning, he sat on the shed floor and sorted through the scraps by matching pieces and putting them in little piles. Some were illegible but others matched perfectly. The best was a statement from a bank in Scotland addressed to his mum in Sorrenbridge. Instead of glue, he smeared a thin layer of jam on a sheet of paper and carefully positioned pieces together. After a sticky and
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