“That wasn’t the problem, Juliette. The problem was that I could tell you were getting ready to give up. I could see it. You were going to marry Paul and move into that house, and your playwriting would have always played second fiddle, if it wasn’t forgotten about entirely.”
“So what?” Juliette yells. “That was my choice to make, Isabelle—not yours.”
“I understand that, but even still, I don’t regret pushing you. Writing was always meant to be your destiny.”
“Okay, well, thank you, Great Oracle, for your stellar premonition, but you still didn’t have to jackhammer my life in two!”
“Will you please take some accountability for once?” Isabelle fires back. “All I did was take the house—I didn’t force you to break up with Paul. You could have used the money I gave you and bought any other cottage, but you didn’t. You didn’t because deep down, you knew marrying him then would have been a mistake. If everything with the house never happened, if you moved in and married Paul and then got some job—which you would have had to do to keep the place up—do you think you would have been happy in the long run? No. You would have been resentful. Every day you would look at Paul and remember what you gave up for him, and you never would have recovered. Big dreams require big sacrifices.”
Juliette almost laughs. “You say that so flippantly. You have no idea of the sacrifices I’ve made.”
“Yes, I do,” she says solemnly. “Because in my own way, I had to sacrifice our relationship so your dreams could come true. And it was the hardest, most painful choice I’ve ever made in my life.”
My breath catches, believing Isabelle’s sincerity even if I can’t currently see it in her eyes. Juliette gets up and moves to the far side of the room.
“You can think whatever you want about your noble sacrifice,” she says, “but you started to pull away from me long before I got engaged. You and I were inseparable, and then all of a sudden I was just your eccentric sister that you barely had time for.”
Isabelle crosses her ankles in front of her. “I did what I thought I had to do.”
“Stop saying that!” Juliette shouts. “Are you honestly going to sit there and say you did everything for my sake? You stole the house and kicked me out of your life for my benefit?” Isabelle doesn’t answer, and her silence seems to enrage Juliette further. “Admit it! Admit that you were sick of me. Admit that you were jealous. Admit that every time you looked at me, you were reminded of your own failure, and you couldn’t stand the fact that I still had a chance, and you didn’t.”
“Of course I was jealous!” Isabelle answers with a roar. “Do you think it was easy to be your sister, Juliette? And to be clear, I wasn’t just your sister. I was your mother, your caretaker, your cheerleader, your sounding board, your whipping boy. I was the one who always took care of you, and what did I ever get in return? Your friendship? Your wit? Maybe you have these glorious, glittering memories of our lives in London, but let me remind you, it wasn’t all rainbows. If you weren’t complaining, you were in a bad mood. If you were writing and I was in the apartment, I couldn’t make a sound. You were up and down and high and low, and you expected me to cater to you all the time because that’s what I always did, and eventually, I got so tired that I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”
“And the truth finally comes out,” Juliette says, sounding triumphant and self-assured. “So maybe you weren’t such a martyr after all, then. Maybe you just didn’t like me anymore, and my dreams were the excuse you needed to do your dirty work.”
Isabelle springs up from the couch and follows her sister’s path.
“A middle ground existed, Juliette. You just refused to see it. I was in my twenties, but it felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders. I should have been allowed to love you while also being entitled to take a break. I should have been allowed to want things for myself without being seen as some selfish, evil mastermind.”
The room falls quiet, and I don’t know what to make of it. Are they silently forgiving each other? Staring each other down? It feels like I’m in the orchestra pit at a Broadway musical—hearing all the action without catching a single glimpse.
“When I couldn’t get any work,” Isabelle eventually says, “when I knew I would never make it as an actress, I felt like I was always letting you down. I was your older sister. I was supposed to be the one who blazed the trail, but it was in that moment that I realized you truly didn’t need me, and not only that, I was legitimately holding you back.”
“That’s not true,” Juliette tells her.
“Yes, it is.” Isabelle comes back around to sit on the couch, and Juliette slowly but surely joins her as her sister goes on. “Your writing was getting better and better. You were right on the verge—all you needed was your big break. In your mind you were failing, but in reality, it was me who was failing. I went to hundreds of auditions and was told no over and over again. I was too tall, too short, too young, too old, too expressive, not expressive enough. There were endless reasons why I never got cast in anything, but the real reason was that I wasn’t good enough. And it hurt so much to feel like nothing all the time. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Silence stretches several moments before Juliette speaks. “You could have done something else. You could have found any other job, but instead, you had to go groveling back into Dad’s good graces.”
“So what if I did?” Isabelle asks. “He was our father.”
“He couldn’t care less about us. We were invisible until we eventually benefited him.”
Isabelle laughs, so soft and faint that I almost don’t catch her next words. “A trait I think we both picked up.” Quiet once again fills the room until she goes on. “I’m only being honest. We learned to take what we needed from people to survive and thrive, and I know you like to believe that Dad has no part in us, but we’re both more like him than we think.”
“We’re better than him,” Juliette says, her voice cracking just a bit.
“Maybe so,” Isabelle agrees. “But he also wasn’t the tyrant you made him out to be in your head. He was flawed, like all of us.”
“I’m aware of that, Isabelle. We weren’t strangers when I went back to New York. We found a relationship that worked for us.”
“I’m glad to hear that. When he got sick, he told me he saw you from time to time, but nothing specific.”
“We were fine. It was a bond forged out of necessity. He was the only family I had after you and I stopped talking.”
I stay firmly locked in position as I watch Isabelle’s feet move the tiniest bit closer to Juliette. “I turned to Dad because I was tired of believing that I wasn’t enough. I wanted to do something where I could be proud of myself again. I needed to do that, for me. And then I met Freddie, and he made me feel wanted and worthwhile, and it was honestly so nice.”
“I never had a problem with your shiny ball,” Juliette tells her. Her voice sounds a little softer. Less guarded. It’s shockingly refreshing.
