Sink or Swim

Chapter 9

"I told her not to! Why aren't you up there stopping her?"

"Yeah, I'm not going to argue with Lalia. I'll give you a boost up the stairs but that's all I can do."

Skye gawked at the redhead for a couple of seconds before sighing and climbing up from her seat. "I don't need a boost, I can manage."

"If you're going to be as slow as you were in the coffee shop, the call will be over and done with by the time you get up there."

Skye rolled her eyes and headed to Lalia's room as quickly as she could manage to.

Lalia was a good person, deep down. She had such a innocent, girly tone to her voice and yet the amount of times she'd got into trouble was unbelievable. Her celebrity status after winning a medal or two at the Olympics had calmed her down a little, but it looked like her hatred for fame had driven her back into her old ways.

As Skye and Charlene reached the top of the staircase, they could already hear Lalia in her room, talking into her expensive, rose-gold laptop. "I really don't want you to worry about this. My neck will heel eventually, I just won't be able to do any running for some time. Whiplash can be so hard on the body."

"Lalia Lovelace, we will not let anybody get away with doing this to you."

"Daddy-" Yes, she was twenty-nine and still called her father that.

"No Lalia, you are a multi-award winning athlete and Olympian. This will do your career great harm and you know what? You may not even have a career to go back to. You are almost thirty after all."

The man's voice made Skye quiver a little. She contemplated running in and telling the truth but she couldn't bear to be on the receiving end of Lalia's parent's anger. They were the kind of people who always got their way.

As Skye stood in the doorway of the room watching, she could see Lalia trying to flatten the smile that wanted to beam over her father's comment about not having a career to go back to. Her own heart fluttered with guilt. The pressure from Lalia's parents had become so difficult for her cousin that she was willing to lie to them.

"Your mother and I will hire a private investigator. We will get to the bottom of this, I promise. Whoever ran yourself and Skye off the road will be prosecuted and that is a promise."

Whilst Skye wanted to know who it was that had been driving the car, she was intelligent enough to know that lying wasn't the way and it was unlikely they would get much out of it. By now, Lalia had noticed her and Charlene hanging by her door and quickly wrapped up the call. To Skye, who had relatively normal parents, it was like watching two parents fussing over a toddler.

Sharp eyes rolled from Lalia and over to Charlene. "Did you tell her?!"

"No! No way. The call was loud, she could hear from downstairs. I tried to stop her coming up but you know what Skye's like."

"I am in the room," Skye breathed out, rolling her hands down her face. "You can't half talk some rubbish," she whispered in Charlene's ear before shooing her away so that she could have a private conversation with her cousin.

Skye slowly shut the door and hobbled over to Lalia's bed to sit down. "How could you do this to me?"

"This isn't about you. It's about me and making my life better."

"But it affects me. I want to know who did this to me more than anything. The flashbacks, the anger, the sense of loss...I want it to go away and knowing who did it will help, but-" Skye shook her head slowly from side to side, eventually halting it as she bit the side of her lip. She took a deep breath. "What happens when the police tell your parents that I was the only one found in the car at the scene of the crash?"