It had been the summer before Mom got sick. Victoria had been away at some conference, and Dad had been swamped with work. Lily had been fourteen, and I’d been seventeen, home from my first year of college. I’d driven us both up to the beach house in my old beat-up car, windows down, music blaring.
“You taught me how to body surf,” she said, smiling faintly. “I thought I was going to drown. You kept telling me to relax and just go with the wave.”
“You kept screaming,” I recalled. “Even when the water was only waist-deep.”We laughed, and something eased between us.
It didn’t happen all at once, but stitch by stitch, we started sewing a new kind of relationship—one not orchestrated by Victoria, not mediated through competition or comparison. Just two women who’d been pulled into the same orbit by chance and grief, trying to figure out what it meant to be sisters.
Dad filed for divorce.
I found out from Lily first, then from him when he came up to the house one afternoon, looking oddly hopeful and terrified at the same time.