I answered anyway.
Her voice came through bright and overly cheerful, the kind of tone that always made me uneasy because it felt practiced rather than natural. “We’re having a small gathering today,” she said, as if the decision had already been made for me. “Your sister-in-law brought her son over, and everyone’s asking about Sophie. You should come.”
There are moments when you sense something is wrong without knowing why, but you go anyway because you want to believe in normalcy, in family, in the idea that people will behave the way they are supposed to.
So I packed a small bag, helped Sophie into her shoes, and drove over.
The house looked exactly the same as it always had—perfectly trimmed hedges, polished windows, the illusion of order maintained like a performance for the outside world—but the moment I stepped inside, I felt it again, that faint tension beneath the surface, like a conversation that had already started without me.
My sister-in-law, whose name I’ll call Rachel, was sitting in the living room with her son, a boy a couple of years older than Sophie, while my in-laws hovered nearby, talking about something trivial that didn’t matter. Rachel looked up when we entered, her smile thin and sharp in a way that never quite reached her eyes.
“Well,” she said lightly, “look who finally decided to show up.”
