Her grip was the same grip she’d used when I was twelve and told her I didn’t want to babysit Kristen again, when I was sixteen and told her I wanted to apply to a college far away, when I was twenty-two and told her I wasn’t going to keep sending money “just until Kristen gets on her feet.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a correction.
I met her gaze, then looked toward my relatives. Some of them looked like they wanted to step in. Some looked like they wanted to disappear. The party had become an unwilling audience to an old family dynamic I’d spent years trying to outgrow.
“Fine,” I said.
My mother’s shoulders relaxed, as if she’d won something.
My father moved quickly, already imagining the hallway conversation ending with my surrender. Kristen followed with the lightness of someone certain she was about to be rewarded.
We left the living room and stepped into the wide corridor that led toward the stairs. The noise of the party fell behind us like a curtain, muffled by distance and expensive walls.
And then I smelled it.
Kristen’s perfume.