“What?” Hoyt asked.
I closed my eyes and let it all out.
“I came here to tell Mom I wanted to be a writer. And Dad was here, and we got in an argument about the bookstore, the house… I kept asking him to finally tell me why the hell he hated me so much. And he did. He told me it was my fault Mom had died. Her cancer… They could have cured it if she’d accepted treatment. But…she didn’t because she was pregnant with me. If…if she’d gotten an abortion, she could have recovered. She’d have been there for your birthdays, she’d have met Scott and Megan. She’d be a grandmother one day… And now, none of that will happen because I screwed it up.”
Between the hiccups, the panting, the tears, the trembling, I could barely speak. Hoyt and Hayley just stood there and stared, eyes wide.
“Dad told you that?” Hoyt said. “What else did he say?”
“That he would never forgive me.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“He said…I owed him, I owed you. I said sorry, I asked him to forgive me, I really am sorry, I said, but it wasn’t enough for him. He wanted me to show it.”
“Show it? How?” Hayley asked.
“By being the person he always wanted me to be. And I tried. Iwent home, I took a job at the company, I forgot my dreams, writing, the bookstore… I broke up with Trey, and now he’s with another girl. I don’t matter to him anymore. All I want is to disappear.”
“Trey?” they asked in unison.
“What does Trey have to do with this?” Hayley asked.
My brother didn’t even blink. So many emotions were running through him that he was in a daze, but then a moment came when he understood. He brought his hands to his head.
“I’m going to kill him. I’m going to string him up by his balls and…”
“Hoyt! You’re standing at your mother’s grave!” Hayley reproached him.
“No!” I shouted, rushing to Trey’s defense. “He didn’t do anything wrong. He helped me. A lot. He wanted to tell you, he wanted to tell both of you, but he didn’t have time. I broke up with him first and made him promise he wouldn’t tell.”
“Did he sleep with you?”
“Hoyt!” Hayley shouted.
“What? I need to know. I can’t believe that bastard was doing it with my little sister and didn’t tell me. My best friend! Fuck!”
Hayley ignored him—to her, he was acting like a child—and she concentrated on me. “So you’re telling me you and Trey…?” I nodded. “For how long?”
As I tried to pull myself together, I realized how strange the situation was. I had opened my heart to them, and the only thing they actually seemed to care about was me going out with Trey. I turned around and walked away. And then I understood. It was as predictable as the ending of a story. How could I have failed to see it?
I turned back to them. “Why weren’t you surprised when I told you about Mom?” They looked at each other, clueless as to howto respond. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew. And you never said anything.”
“Harper, we couldn’t. We promised we never would. It was a secret. You were never supposed to know,” Hayley said.
“Why?”
“Because of this!” she shouted. “Because you’d blame yourself when you’d never done anything. You deserved to live without that burden.”
“Yeah, Pumpkin,” Hoyt interrupted her. “This isn’t your burden to bear. There is no guilty party here. It’s just a tragedy, and that’s that.”
“You knew,” I repeated, more for me than for them. “Since when?”
Hayley looked at Mom’s grave, as though asking forgiveness or seeking permission. Then she looked at me wearily.
“Mom told us not long before she died. She knew Dad would blame you, he already did before you were born, and she was scared he would turn us against you. But we understood, and we promised her we’d take care of you just as she would.”
“But it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to you, having to deal with that responsibility when you were so little.”
