The Winter Sister(55)

I texted with Lauren on Sunday, trying to get back to that place. Mom and I were barely speaking. After spitting and sobbing more words to each other on Thursday than we had in sixteen years, we’d spent most of the next few days in the living room—together, watching TV, but silent. Now, while Mom flipped through channels, I huddled up with my phone on the couch, texting Lauren about Wolf Bro, the nickname we’d given to one of her clients. He was a guy in his midthirties who always boasted about the women he’d “beasted” over the weekend, and he’d been scheduled to come back that week for session three of his wolf tattoo.

“Ugh,” Lauren wrote. “Wolf Bro now wants a full moon done over his entire right pec, because—exact quote—‘a true wolf needs something to howl at.’?”

“Genius,” I replied.

“I know, right? Because how else will the chicks at the gym know what an animal he is in the sheets?”

“Haha.”

“I swear, it took everything I had not to scream at him that no self-respecting woman would ever fuck a guy with a wolf tattoo.”

“Haha,” I typed again, but I didn’t even smile.

I tried to be engaged in the conversation. I tried to picture us in our apartment, handing a bag of Doritos back and forth as we laughed about Wolf Bro. I even saw us swiping orange crumbs onto the floor and joking that Claude, our fictional French housekeeper, would vacuum them up later. But every time I went to type a response to Lauren, to embed myself deeper into the comfort of that fantasy, I found myself nearly writing what was really on my mind instead, all the unanswered questions I’d collected over the last week: What had Tommy Dent wanted with Persephone’s things, and what had happened to them after all this time?

And why had he told the police to talk to the mo—

“So how’s it going with your mom?” Lauren texted, and I was grateful to be yanked away from the skipping record of those questions. “Is it weird between you guys?”

“Yeah,” I responded quickly. “It’s really weird.”

“Is she acting like you’re her personal bartender instead of her nurse?”

“No, she’s actually sober. Apparently it hurts when she drinks now, because . . . cancer.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” Lauren replied. “So then have you guys talked about it? How she drank herself into oblivion for half your life?”

“There’s nothing to talk about really,” I said. “I already know why she did it.”

“So?? That doesn’t make it right! Yes, she lost a daughter, and that’s really tragic, but so many parents have lost children, and they don’t just shut down forever. They mourn, of course, but they eventually move on. It was so selfish that she didn’t find a way to do that—for YOUR sake at least!”

Even through text, Lauren’s tone was sharp and unforgiving, same as it always was when she talked about Mom. I knew she spoke that way out of fierce loyalty to me, but as I read her message again, I couldn’t help but feel that it was a little unfair. And that wasn’t Lauren’s fault. It was mine.

“It was hard for her to move on,” I wrote. “She never got any closure.”

“Don’t make excuses for her,” Lauren replied. “No one ever gets closure when they lose someone they love.”

“Yeah . . . but it was the way she lost her . . .”

I felt my heart thumping then. It was picking up speed as I snuck closer to the truth—truth I’d hidden since the beginning of our friendship, truth I’d painted over as if it were a bruise.

“I’m not saying it wasn’t awful,” Lauren said. “A car accident is so unexpected. But it doesn’t give her a free pass out of living.”

“It wasn’t a car accident.”

I’d typed it so quickly that I barely realized what I was doing. But now I had said it. I’d scratched off the paint of that lie. I could almost see it under my fingernails as I gripped the phone in my hand.

Taking a deep breath, I typed out the rest. “She was murdered. And they never solved the case.”

The second I pressed Send, I felt dizzy, and I leaned my head against the back of the couch to steady myself. When I looked at my phone a few moments later, the space where Lauren’s response would be was empty. There wasn’t even a typing icon, and I stared at the screen until one finally appeared.

“What??” she wrote after a minute.

“I’m so sorry I lied to you,” I rushed forward. “I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about it before. The lie was so much easier. I know that sounds stupid, but . . . ugh. I’m so sorry.”

“Murdered how?” she replied, much faster this time.

“Strangled.”

The temperature in the room seemed to drop by twenty degrees. I imagined I could look up at the ceiling and see snow beginning to fall.

“Holy shit,” Lauren said.

“Yeah . . .”

“And they don’t know who did it?”

I brought my fingers to my lips and breathed against them, trying to warm myself. But soon, I shivered anyway, and my hands began to shake.

“Nope,” I responded.

“Wow,” Lauren said. “This is . . . I don’t even know. That’s a really huge thing to never tell me.”