Lanie was wrong. My life wasn’t perfect. It was good more often than it was bad, and some days it was close to great, but it wasn’t perfect. I had Caleb, who was a decent, honorable man, and a place to call home and enough money to feel secure, but I also had a lifetime of pain and regret. I knew not all of that was Lanie’s fault—no matter what I said, some of the blame fell on the shoulders of my father’s killer, whoever that might be, and another portion rested on those of my late mother. Still, I held Lanie accountable for most of the lingering hurt.
There were so many things I could have said to Lanie, so many examples of how she had failed me, but, regrettably, when I opened my mouth, what came out was: “You married Adam.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding readily. “I did.”
“You . . . How . . .” I stuttered, unable to find the words to express how I felt. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
She frowned a little. “I was just trying to do the right thing.”
“How was that the right thing?” I demanded, a suppressed sob threatening to break my chest in two. I would not cry in front of her; I would not show her how much her betrayal still hurt me. “I just don’t understand what happened.”
“Do you really want to know?” she asked quietly.
No, I thought, as my mouth whispered, “Yes.”
Lanie’s finger danced across the quilt, tracing what looked like a heart. She cleared her throat and, in a tiny voice, said, “When Adam and I slept together—”
“When you took advantage of him,” I corrected automatically, even though an electric jolt ran through my body, reminding me that Adam’s account was untrue.
Her eyes flashed with sudden anger, and she sent her fist flying into the bed with a small thwump.
“That’s bullshit,” she spit. “Is that what he told you? That’s not what happened.”
“What happened, then?”
“Adam came on to me.”
Unbidden, Ellen’s voice came into my head, a line from the past: Adam looks pretty wrecked. Cursed with the last scheduled final, I had been driving home for summer break days after everyone else. I had planned on leaving first thing the following morning, but the campus was deserted and so I decided to leave that evening instead. I called Adam as I neared town, eager to see him. Because he had gone to school out of state and our spring break plans had fallen through, I hadn’t seen him since the holidays. I was disappointed when he didn’t answer his phone. I called Ellen next, who shouted into the phone over the din of music and laughter that Benny Weston’s parents were out of town and he had a couple of kegs.
“Come straight here,” she commanded. “Everyone’s here.”
“Is Adam there? He didn’t answer when I called.”
“Probably because he’s too busy drinking his face off. Want me to tell him you’re on the way so that he has a chance to sober up?”
“No, let’s keep it a surprise,” I said, imagining the delight on Adam’s face when he saw I was home early.
It was a devastating mistake, but I hadn’t known it then: I simply had never known Adam to be much of a drinker, and I didn’t assume that one year of college could have changed him that much. I thought Ellen was just being Ellen—that is to say, overly judgmental.
“You might want to drive fast, then. Adam looks pretty wrecked.”
“Adam was drunk,” I said to Lanie, my voice wavering.
“And you think I was sober? Honestly, Josie, why do you think I was even at that party? Ryder had heard that Benny’s mom had a decent stash of painkillers, and we raided the medicine cabinet. I was so high I didn’t even know my own name.”
I nearly snapped that it must have made it easier to pretend to be me, but I swallowed the response. Adam had known. Lanie didn’t need to impersonate me. I closed my eyes, recalling how I had made my way into the sweaty mass of people in Benny’s living room just in time to see Adam descending the stairs, Lanie at his side. Adam’s cheeks were flushed, his golden hair tousled, his smile dopey. His T-shirt was on inside out. His glazed eyes landed on me, and his color drained. He ran a hand over his face, a gesture that I interpreted at the time as astonishment, but in retrospect was clearly guilt. How could I have missed it?
Adam had known. It was a punch in the gut, realizing that the anger I had clung to for so many years—the notion that my sister had purposefully imitated me in order to steal my boyfriend away—was misplaced. Adam was no innocent in this . . . but that didn’t absolve Lanie. She owed me a duty of blood. Adam might have betrayed me, but Lanie was the one who broke my heart.
“You’re my sister,” I said, my voice nothing more than a whisper. “How could you do that to me?”
“I did a lot of things then that I’m not proud of,” Lanie said, her voice hardening. “But what about you?”
“What about me?” I demanded, surprised. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You left,” she spit. “Without so much as ‘goodbye’ or ‘have a nice life’ or ‘fuck you.’ You just left. You were all I had, and you left.”
“If I meant that much to you, maybe you should’ve thought about what you were doing,” I snapped, “instead of just doing whatever your id demanded.”
But Lanie was beyond listening to me, her face crumpled in anger and indignant tears streaming down her cheeks. “You didn’t even tell me where you were going. You told Ellen. Ellen. She’s not your sister. I am.”
“Ellen isn’t the one who slept with my boyfriend!”
Lanie snatched a pillow off the bed and pressed her face into it, screaming. When she tossed it aside, her cheeks were mottled red and stained with mascara, but her temper seemed calm. “I needed you,” she said. “Dammit, Josie, I really needed you.”
“I needed you,” I argued. “I didn’t want to go through all that stuff with Mom and Dad alone. But you wouldn’t have anything to do with me. You were too busy getting high with Ryder and God knows what else.”
“I was a mess,” she said quietly. “But you were supposed to understand. You, my sister. But then you left, and I was an even bigger mess, and the only person around to help me pick up the pieces was Adam. He was the only one who understood.”
“What do you mean Adam understood?”
“You left him, too. You were the most important person in both of our lives. And, yeah, maybe we fucked everything up, but if you loved us half as much as we loved you, you would have forgiven us. Or at least stuck around to listen to the apology. But you were just gone, and neither of us knew what to do. We missed you, and no one else understood how gutted we felt to have lost you. No one understood us except each other.”
“And . . . what? Missing me was foreplay?”