Chapter 14
I didn’t answer that night.
I wasn’t ready.
But this letter didn’t go into a drawer.
I taped it to the refrigerator beside the purple dog with the bandaged paw.
Lauren arrived during week seven.
Unexpectedly.
It was a gray Saturday afternoon. I was under a blanket in the living room, half reading a novel, when the bell rang.
Thinking it was Camille, I answered in socks.
My sister stood outside.
Alone.
Something about her looked different. Then I realized she wore no makeup, and her hair was pulled back with a simple elastic.
Her pregnancy was unmistakable beneath her coat, both hands resting protectively over her belly.
She’d clearly been crying.
“I’m sorry to just show up,” Lauren said. “I know I should have called. I didn’t think you’d pick up.”
That hurt more than expected.
“Come in,” I said. “It’s cold.”
She perched on the sofa like a visitor in a stranger’s house, still wearing her coat, purse held tightly against her lap.
I made tea mostly to occupy my hands.
When I set the mug down, she stared at it.
“I deleted the video,” she said abruptly.
“What video?”
“The one I posted that day. The one where I thanked Mom and Dad for helping with the house.” She looked up at me, her eyes swimming. “I watched it again about a week later, and I saw what I’d missed. The clock on my kitchen wall. It said 6:40. And I knew, because I’d seen the messages in the group chat, that you had been calling all day. I saw them, Miranda. I saw please come, I’m scared, and I put my phone down and I said to myself, Mom and Dad will handle it.”
She wiped her face.
“That’s the sentence I’ve been saying my whole life. Mom and Dad will handle it. When my car broke down, when I couldn’t pay rent, when I didn’t know how to file taxes. And this time I used it on you. On my own sister. In a hospital bed.”
I sat opposite her and let her continue.
“I’ve been angry at you for seven weeks,” she said. “Trevor was furious. He kept saying you’d been unfair, that you’d changed everything in a moment of weakness, that we should fight it. And I wanted so badly to agree, because agreeing would have meant I hadn’t done anything wrong.” Her voice cracked. “But every time I closed my eyes, I saw that clock.”
“Lauren.”
“Let me say the rest. Please.” She took a shaky breath. “I’m thirty one years old, and I’ve never once paid a bill without somebody catching me if I was late. I’m about to have a baby, and I have no idea how to be somebody a child could rely on, because I never had to learn. Mom and Dad made sure of it. They thought they were being generous, but they were really just afraid I’d fall. And you were the one who was never allowed to.” She pressed her hand against her mouth. “And I let them. I let them love me that way, because it was so comfortable.”
