Before I had put the phone down, another message arrived. This one from Lily: Mom told me what you did. You deserve it. You’ve never really been part of this family anyway.
I stared at that one longer than I stared at Victoria’s. Lily had been nine years old when her mother married my father, a quiet, uncertain child who clutched a stuffed rabbit and moved through our house like she was waiting for permission to put her feet down. Somewhere in the intervening years, Victoria had shaped her into a precise echo: the same tilted skepticism, the same practiced contempt, the same hair-trigger accusation of jealousy whenever I took up space in a room. It was not Lily’s fault, not entirely, and I knew that. But it had made her a willing instrument for a long time.
My father called an hour later. He sounded tired in the specific way he had sounded for years, a tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the ongoing work of not seeing clearly.
“Alexandra,” he began, “please don’t make this difficult.”
Not: is what Victoria said true? Not: are you all right? Just the familiar plea for me to absorb the situation quietly and allow the peace of the household to remain undisturbed, the peace being less about anyone’s actual wellbeing and more about Victoria’s comfort.
