The Winter Sister(38)

“That had nothing to do with you,” I said. “Persephone wasn’t allowed to date anyone.”

He cocked his head to the side. “Are you sure about that?”

“Yes,” I said, but even as I sat there, my arms crossed, there was a part of me that wondered. All those years ago, when Mom came home to find Ben with Persephone, she kicked him out and began yelling. I’d always attributed that to Mom’s anger that her dating rule had been broken, but thinking of it now, it was as if she’d known for a fact that Ben would only hurt Persephone, as if she could see right through to the very core of him—and maybe what she saw was Will. A man who—what? Had driven her crazy? Had left her beaten and bruised as her daughter would be?

It was so difficult to fathom, even with the evidence gaping up at me. The only time I’d ever seen them interact was at Persephone’s wake. Beyond that, she’d never mentioned him. Then again, she’d never talked about any of the men she’d been with, not even the ones she went out with sporadically when Persephone and I were kids. On those occasions, she’d have Aunt Jill come over to watch us, be gone for several hours, and then return to tuck us in, the smell of garlic overpowering her flowery perfume. If I asked her anything about how the date had gone, she’d just smile, skim her fingers over my face, and kiss me on the forehead. She had a history of silence, I realized, even before Persephone had died. She’d had so many secrets stored inside her, it was a wonder I’d ever felt close to her at all.

“And the other thing,” Ben said, “is that . . .” He was speaking more slowly, and he was shifting around, the plastic chair creaking each time he moved. “Well, it has to do with the night Persephone died.”

My eyes widened before I had a chance to stop them. “Yeah?” I prompted.

“Well, we had this fight. It—she’d—okay. Let me start over.” He took a deep breath, rolling his shoulders back and forth as if preparing for a workout. “I dropped her off like I always did, but something was wrong. She couldn’t get back into her room.”

He paused to look at me, his black-hole eyes lingering on my face just long enough to suggest he knew what I’d done. I stared back at him, biting down on the inside of my cheek.

“So she came back to the car,” he said. “And she got in, explained what had happened, and told me to drive. So I did, and . . . I told her that I thought we should try to talk to her mom. I said if we were just upfront with her about our relationship and told her how much we meant to each other, then everything would be out in the open, and she wouldn’t have to keep sneaking in and out.”

He shook his head, closing his eyes for a second. “But she didn’t want to do that. She was like, ‘It’s a waste of time, my mom’s horrible, she’ll never listen.’ So I asked her why she wasn’t willing to fight for us, and things—escalated from there. I should have known they would. She was already pissed when she got in the car.” He slid the photograph in circles on the table, his eyes avoiding mine. “Eventually, she demanded I let her out. It was snowing, though, and she was a mile from her house. I told her no, and I was going to start heading back to her street, but then she just—went wild. She was kicking the dashboard, unbuckling her seat belt, yelling at me to stop the car. I’d—I’d never seen her like that, so I did what she said. I let her out.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down inside his neck as he swallowed. He scratched his shoulder, looked out the window, squinting at the sun as it emerged from behind a cloud, and then, for the briefest of moments, his eyes flicked back toward me. “And then I was pissed off, I guess,” he said. “So I drove away.” He stared at the table, his voice worn down to a whisper. “I fucking drove away.”

I didn’t know how long the tears had been in my eyes, but when he finished speaking, I felt them spill over my lashes and onto my cheeks. The girl he was describing was, without a doubt, Persephone—my Persephone—who could swoon over a white rose, but could just as easily scream at our mother and pummel pillows in our room. I could picture her raging against the inside of Ben’s car, slamming her fists against the window until he did what she demanded. She was like that, always needing to get her way. But where was that rage, that fight, whenever he hurt her? Why had she returned to him at all?

I swiped a hand across my cheek, wiping the tears onto my jeans. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

He flipped the photo back over so that the side with Mom and Will was facing up. He tapped her face three times. “Ever since I found this picture,” he said, “I just keep thinking how—if your mom had just come out with it, if she’d just been honest with Persephone about why she didn’t want her to see me, then maybe we could have talked through it. I could have told her that I wasn’t like my dad, and then—we wouldn’t have been fighting that night, and then—”

“So you’re saying this is all my mom’s fault?”

Just like that, my eyes were dry and my chest flared hot with anger. I dug my fingernails into my palms.

“No,” Ben said, shaking his head. “I’m just looking for some way to feel—less guilty, I guess. I think of Persephone every single day, you know.”

“Good! You should! You should never stop thinking about how you hurt her. You should be so filled with guilt that it’s impossible to get out of bed every day.”