There was another pause. “Ah…”
Something hard hit me in the chest.
“I know that she had talked to him…”
I held my breath.
“Luna?” she said a little too sweetly, her voice a little too high.
“Yeah?” I muttered, trying to tell myself to calm down. To not get riled up. To not get mad.
I was going to be patient. I was going to be calm. Whatever it was wouldn’t be the end of life.
“Don’t get mad,” was what she decided to start with, and of course my body decided to react the exact opposite way of what she was asking. My blood pressure was already starting to climb. “We both thought it was a bad idea if we told you about the calls.”
They had both been keeping it from me.
Both of them.
That’s what she was trying to hint.
Two of my sisters had been hiding this from me.
I must have sucked in a breath orsomethingbecause Kyra made a sound that sounded strangely like a gulp. “Oh, Luna. I promised her I wouldn’t say anything about her job. But about Dad… Don’t be mad. It’s no big deal. He calls her sometimes and they talk. I’ve talked to him a couple of times—”
What?
And I stopped listening. I stopped listening because my ears were buzzing, and genuine freaking fury and hurt like I didn’t think I was capable of feeling filled my chest.
Kyra said something about how it had been going on foronly a year or two.
She said something else about how they both loved me and how it had nothing to do with me.
Told me not to worry about whatever it was that Thea was doing for work that even our dad disapproved of.
It had nothing to do with me.
I wouldn’t say it was fury that stole the words from my soul. Wouldn’t say it was anger that made my heart break even further. But I lost something then. Something I wasn’t sure I could or would ever be able to put into words.
Somehow though, I managed to ask the one other question that had been eating away at me lately. “Kyra, what else is she hiding from me?”
The silence was a better response than any of the words she might have used could or would ever be.
Even though a part of me didn’t want to ask and was honestly scared to pry… I couldn’t help myself. I was tired of the secrets. Tired of so much stuff I wasn’t ready to think about everything. “Did she tell you her place got broken into? Because I didn’t even know she moved, and if she needs help, you all should know I will always help you. I just want to know what’s going on, okay?”
What I got was another dose of a pause.
Another response that said that the trust I thought was between us was just in my imagination, and her next words changed everything between us for the rest of our lives.
“I’ll tell her you called and that she needs to call you back,” Kyra went on, ignoring my question, but the only thing I was aware of was hanging up eventually. Of standing there, numb and pretty much shattered by the knowledge they had gone behind my back to talk to someone who had treated me worse than trash. Someone who would have let them starve if it hadn’t been for me. Someone who had never washed a single load of their clothes ever in their lives. Someone who had never, ever bought them a single birthday present or Christmas present. Who had never supported them in school or much less encouraged them to go to college.
And if I would have been the kind of person who smashed their phone, I would have done it.
What I did instead was take a deep breath that included that part of me that I had lost, then turn around and kick an empty five-gallon bucket across the room.
I made a decision right then, as I pulled at the bracelet of unicorns at my wrist. I wasn’t going to let my dad ruin this day for me. Not when he had already ruined my relationship with my sisters in the two shortest phone calls of my life.
* * *
