The Winter Sister(54)

Her eyes widened, and in the span of a few seconds, moved through a spectrum of emotions—first disbelief, then surprise, then anger—before finally brimming with a simple, broken sadness.

“Like I said,” she whispered, “he broke my heart.”

She stared past me, her eyes landing somewhere on the wall, and I wondered what scenes from her life with Will were playing out in front of her there. Inching closer to her again and taking a deep breath, I prepared myself for my final question—the sole reason her past with Will Emory mattered to me at all.

“So is this why you didn’t want Persephone to be with Ben? Not because of your dating rule, but because—because of who Ben’s father was? And how he’d hurt you?”

Her eyes flicked away from the wall, and when they found mine, the ache inside them was as visible as the leaden gray of her irises.

“Yes,” she said.

Yes. The air became heavy, making it difficult to reel in my breath. Yes, Ben had been right—again. Yes, Mom could have just told us about Will from the start. Yes—what I said to Persephone when she asked me to paint her bruises. Yes when it was her wrist, yes when it was her arm, yes when it was her rib.

“Do you realize,” I said shakily, “what you did by not telling us? You turned them into fucking Romeo and Juliet, Mom, when maybe, if you’d just told her that you’d dated Ben’s father and he’d hurt you and you didn’t want the same thing to happen to her, then maybe—”

“Stop.”

“—things would have been different. Maybe she would have told Ben that things were—I don’t know—too complicated for them to be together. Or maybe you guys would have talked about it like normal human beings and you’d realize that she was allowed to learn her own lessons, make her own—”

“I told you to stop it!” she cried, and the look in her eyes was no longer one of remembered misery. Instead, there was a knifelike sharpness to her stare that made me swallow the rest of my words.

“You have no idea,” she said, “what it would have taken for me to talk about it. What it still takes, now. So don’t tell me what I should have done, or how things would have been different if I’d just been honest, because . . . well . . . you should know, huh?”

She glared at me but didn’t continue.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, and seeing the piercing accusation in her eyes, I felt my throat tighten.

“You weren’t so honest, either.”

Come on, Sylvie, it’s just one tonight. Yes when it was her hip. Yes when it was her shoulder. Yes when I was tired and cold and wanted nothing more than to stay wrapped in the cocoon of my bed. Don’t ever tell Mom, okay? You have to promise me, Sylvie—and I kept my promises to my sister, every one until that final night. Now, my breath started coming in shallow little gasps.

“Isn’t that right, Sylvie?” Mom pressed.

You have to leave the window cracked, just a little. You’ll be the best sister ever if you do it. But Mom didn’t know how I’d broken that particular promise—she couldn’t. She must have only meant how Persephone snuck out to see Ben, how I kept that from her until it was too late. Because nobody knew how I held the latch in my fingers on that final night, then clicked it into place. No one had seen me jump into bed when I saw Persephone coming; no one knew how long she tapped at the glass, certain, at first, that I’d just made a mistake. Now, my eyes were so blurred that I could barely see Mom in front of me anymore.

I’m your only sister, Sylvie. I could still hear her say it. You have to do this for me, and you can’t ever tell. The tears fell hot and fast down my cheeks as Mom watched me, knowing how I’d betrayed her. Yes when it was her arm. Yes when it was her leg. Yes when I still thought we had a thousand more nights, and in one of them, I’d finally say no.

As the first sob wrenched its way out of my body, I pitched forward, dropping my head into my hands.

“You’re right,” I said, gulping for air between words. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I—I didn’t know she’d . . .”

My chest heaved and sank as I collapsed under the weight of such old, lingering grief. I fell against Mom, my head landing in her lap, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t adjust my position; I could only curl into myself like I’d once curled up in her womb.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, tasting the tears on my lips. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Shhh,” Mom said, and I felt her hand, light as a petal, on the top of my head. She ran her fingers through my hair, slowly and gently, and then placed them on my forehead and started all over, stroke after stroke after stroke.

“It’s okay,” she said as I cried against her stomach. “We all played our part, Sylvie. We all played our part.”





18




Somehow, living in Providence, I’d found myself in a place of ease. Strange, now, to think of it, now that I was so far from that world, sucked instead back into the one I’d thought I’d peeled off of me like a sunburn. It had only been a few weeks since my last shift at Steve’s, but already, I could barely remember how to load the ink into the gun. I could remember wiping beads of blood from flesh, but when I pictured those moments, wearing those blue latex gloves, it was someone else’s hand I saw.