“Dad’s talking about divorce,” she said, barely above a whisper. “He and Victoria… they’ve been fighting. A lot. About the house. About you. About… everything. I heard things I wasn’t supposed to hear. And I started thinking about… all the times Mom said stuff about you. About how you were selfish, or jealous, or dramatic.”
She swallowed. “And then I watched you that day with the cops. You weren’t dramatic. You were… calm. That lawyer said Mom—I mean, your mom—put the house in your name years ago. Victoria knew that. She pretended she didn’t.”
She glanced at me, eyes glistening. “So I went through her desk.”
“That,” I said, unable to keep a small, humorless smile from tugging at my lips, “is the most rebellious thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
She huffed out a laugh, surprised. “Yeah, well. Guess you’re a bad influence.”
We fell silent again.
“I owe you an apology,” she said suddenly. “For… everything.”
I opened my mouth to brush it off, to say something about how it didn’t matter, but the words felt wrong. It did matter. It all mattered.
“For all those years I believed everything Mom said about you being jealous and vindictive,” she continued. “She always told me you’d try to steal attention from me, that you thought you were better. Whenever you didn’t come to something, she said it was because you were sulking. I never… I never questioned it.”
She squeezed her keys until they clicked. “But you were just protecting what was rightfully yours. What your mom left you.”
I thought about the countless family dinners I hadn’t been invited to, the holidays I’d spent with friends because “it seemed like you’d be more comfortable doing your own thing,” the graduation party I’d only witnessed through filtered photos.“It was never about the house,” I said. “Not really. The house was the last piece of Mom that she could still protect. She knew someone would try to take it if she didn’t.”
Lily nodded, biting her lip. “Those letters,” she said, nodding toward my hands, “you should read them. Your mom… she wrote about you a lot. About how proud she was. Victoria kept them from you because… I think she couldn’t stand the thought of anyone being more important than her.”
The words landed like a stone and then dissolved into something else—understanding, maybe, and sorrow for a version of Lily who’d never stood a chance.