I pushed off from the doorframe and crossed the kitchen toward her. Claudette watched my approach with wariness, the spoon still suspended in midair.
“Claudette. I need to talk to you about her.”
She held my gaze for a long moment, and I watched the walls go up behind her eyes. She was protecting Pauline. From me.
That shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did.
“I just want to make things right,” I said quietly. “That’s all. I’m not trying to cause trouble, I’m not trying to insert myself into her life uninvited. But something went wrong between us, something I still don’t understand, and I’ve spent seven years not understanding it. I think I deserve to know what I did.”
She set the ice cream container down on the counter beside her and studied me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
“You really don’t know,” she said slowly. “Do you?”
“Would I be here, subjecting myself to Michael’s bedhead, if I did?”
The corner of her mouth twitched in a smile.
“Okay, I’ll hear you out,” she said. “Come on.”
She hopped off the counter and led me through the house to the living room—big windows overlooking a small backyard. I sat down in an armchair while she curled up on the couch across from me, tucking her legs underneath her like a cat settling in.
“Talk,” she said.
“You already know what I want to talk about.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“I need to know what happened. With Pauline. With us.”
“She never told me everything,” Claudette said. “But I know you hurt her and she spent years putting herself back together.”
“How?” The word came out with confusion. “How did I hurt her? I never meant to—I would never have?—”
“Then you should probably figure out what you did.”
“She won’t talk to me. Yesterday she practically sprinted to her car to get away from me.”
“Can you blame her?”
No. I couldn’t. That was the worst part—I couldn’t blame her for anything, because I didn’t know what I was supposed to be blamed for. I had replayed those final weeks a thousand times in my head, searching for the moment everything went wrong, and I still came up empty.
“I asked her to be with me,” I said quietly. “Right before I graduated. She said no. And then she just… disappeared.”
Claudette’s eyebrows rose. “That’s all? You asked and she said no?”
“That’s all. She didn’t give me a reason. She just froze me out—wouldn’t return my calls, wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t talk to me. I told myself I hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know what to think.” I stared at a spot on the floor, unable to look at her. “I thought I could move on, but the last few months proved that was a lie. It doesn’t matterhow much time has passed—I still can’t.” The words came out strained recalling how she had tried to distance herself from me back in Vegas.
I could feel my sister weighing her loyalties, calculating what she could share without betraying Pauline’s trust. It was the same calculation I made in business deals, and I hated seeing it applied to my own family.
“She’s working at California Times,” Claudette said finally. “She transferred from a paper in Newark to be closer to her grandmother.”
My head came up. “Margaret’s sick?”
“Yes.” Her voice went soft. “It’s serious, Jack.”
