I sigh. “I asked you to be a part of this business time and time again after Dad got sick. You refused, so sorry if I’m wary of your sudden enthusiasm.”
While I appreciate—need—her here, I don’t trust that she’ll stay. Knowing my sister’s tendency to switch to a newcauseevery few weeks, I feel she may bail soon.
If I’m honest, it terrifies me. That I’ll be left here alone again, carrying the burden. No purpose, no mission, no drive… just burden.
“Fair enough, but I’m not going anywhere, and we need to learn to work together.”
“Working together doesn’t mean you lead and I follow.”
“No, but when you don’t show up, I need to take over. I want this project to succeed.”
“That’s the point, Tessa, you think of this as a project. It’s not. It’s hard work, long hours, never-ending responsibility, bone-deep exhaustion. Rinse and repeat.”
She blinks, taken aback by my words. “Why have you been doing it for so long then?”
“Because someone had to!”
I think I shocked us both with the statement. The unbidden, surprising confession is so loud in my mind that the deafening drill in the back sounds like a whispered lullaby.
“Let’s go get tea down the road.” Tessa snatches her bag and pivots me toward the door.
We walk in silence and take a seat on a patio, ordering iced teas. Everything around me seems to buzz with intent. I buzz with the realization.
Tessa swirls the straw in her drink. “I understand you think me getting involved is just some kind of a rebound activity post-separation. But I’m here because I want to be, not because I have to be. My promise might not weigh much in your eyes, but I’m not going to bail. For the first time in my life, I wake up with something to do. Something that makes me… feel alive.”
I believe her, and I also appreciate that instead of dissecting my earlier admission, she’s trying to reassure me about her motivation. It helps. Her words seem to free me a bit from the self-inflicted shackles.
“If you can trust me with the bistro, maybeyou can allow yourself some time off,” she continues. “To think about what it is you really want.”
The way out she’s offering feels good, for exactly five seconds. Immediately after, my inner cynic offers many objections. “But Dad—”
“Dad gave up on this business a long time ago. He gave up on his marriage, and then couldn’t live with himself. You can’t fix that for him. You shouldn’t want to, Cora. He’s an adult who made his choices. You can’t change the outcome of his choices. But you certainly can make your own.
“After Ethan died, you left your corporate job and started helping Dad. I thought it was a phase of grief. And then Dad had his stroke, and you just gave up on your own life.”
When she sums it up like that… The younger sister persona awakens in me, and I sulk for a moment, slurping my drink like a petulant child.
“Since when have you been so perceptive?” I murmur around my straw.
“Since I realized I had done a similar thing and given up on my life. For a rich husband.”
Did we? Did we both give up after our parents’ separation? Finding something that felt safe?
“Do you think that’s what we learned from Mom andDad? To give up?”
“God, I hope we got more than that from them. You got talent from Mama.”
I almost spit out my tea. “What are you talking about?”
She rolls her eyes. “The stories you used to write.”
Our mother is a freelance journalist, but I guess I pushed that out of my mind around the time she abandoned us. I never wanted to have that connection.
“You remember my stories?” I wrap my hands around the chilled glass, grounding myself.
“I remember you used to dream, and then you stopped. I remember I used to love the bistro, and I always thought I would take it over, and then the family split… and I guess our ambitions split, as well.”
As much as I don’t want to admit that, her words ring true. “I thought I was protecting Dad.” It sounds so silly when I say it out loud.
