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On the other side, Indy leaned in closer.

“I know that the two of you think that I’m too young to remember for some reason,” she said fiercely. “But I’m not. I wasn’t. The only difference between me and the two of you is that you didn’t have two older sisters to tell you that it wasn’t your fault. To make sure that you knew, every step of the way, that the things that went on in that house affected us, but weren’t about us.”

She leaned in closer and took hold of Kitty’s arm. She curled her hands over like a hook, as if she was trying to tell Kitty what she wanted to say through the heat of her hands. “Has anyone ever said those things to you?” she asked. “Was there anyone to say those things?”

Kitty felt her heart beating entirely too hard in her chest. “This isn’t about that. I don’t need to be told anything. I just don’t like it when anyone backs out on plans that I thought were iron tight.”

“You don’t like it because that’s what Mom and Dad always did,” Flannery said quietly, then. “Every single morning we would wake up and they would change reality right there in front of our faces. Whatever happened the night before, especially if we thought we’d gotten somewhere with them, they would just pretend it hadn’t happened. They lied to us, to each other, and probably to everyone else. Everything they did, they did on a whim and in the heat of the moment, and they never had the slightest regard for the promises they made to us. They liked it that way.” She blew out a breath. “So yes. You like a plan. And I think maybe you found a way to tell yourself that if anyone deviates from that plan, we might as well all be kids again. Stuck in that house, waiting for the sky to fall every night. But we’re not, Kitty, because you got us the hell out of there.”

“Because no one said it, I will,” Indy said then, and gripped Kitty’s arm a little tighter, her gaze unwavering on her sister’s face. “None of what they did was your fault. I know they like to tell you that it was. They’re probably sitting in that same house, right now, arguing over whose fault it is that their disaster of a life is the way it is. I bet that’s the only time they miss us.”

Kitty took a sharp breath, because that landed a little too hard.

“I just think—” she began, valiantly, but it was no use.

“You went to the other extreme,” Flannery interrupted her, calmly.

Her gaze was locked on Kitty and it was hard to look back at her. This was all so much harder than it should have been, but Kitty made herself do it.

Flannery nodded. “You decided that we were going to be supportive of each other, educated, and responsible. You make sure that we saw just about every inch of this country. You’ve always made certain that we all get a vote on the things that we do. You made sure that we are nothing like them. Meanwhile, all you do is work. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you drink more than a single glass of wine in one sitting.” She hesitated, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to say the next thing, but then she did. In a rush. “And if you weren’t absolutely virginal before Finn Patrick, I’d be very surprised.”

Kitty thought that she could hide her reaction to that, but both of her sisters let out a little breath while they watched her face, and she could see that she’d somehow told them the truth anyway. That they were absolutely right.

“You made sure that nothing about you is messy or chaotic,” Indy chimed in. “You’ve taken more time away from the restaurant in the past month than in the previous seven years. And all of this would be absolutely fine and not even worthy of comment if you did it simply because you were happier that way.” Indy squeezed her arm again. “Are you happier, Kitty?”

But she couldn’t answer that. She felt as if she was trapped under the weight of some kind of giant boulder, and it was flattening her where she sat. Like there was that terrible concrete inside her and another boulder on top of her and she could hardly breathe.

“Maybe,” Flannery suggested quietly, gently, “it’s time to ask yourself why you find it so terrifying that Finn might actually just like you.”

Kitty wanted to scream. She thought she might have cried again if she’d had any tears left in her body. She wanted to turn this around and say horribly targeted things to her sisters, so that they could feel this way too. And so they could fight instead of… whatever this was.

But instead she closed her eyes. She took a breath. And she tipped her head back until she felt as if she could simply… throw herself out into some kind of trust fall.

No matter how scary it was.

“I guess I always thought that I had to be useful,” she confessed. “Because if I wasn’t…”

“What I think,” Flannery said, in that same quiet way, “is that none of us should sit around here, in this life that we built with our own hands, still taking advice on how to live our lives from two drunk, deeply narcissistic people who aren’t in the room.”

Indy let out a small sound, like a wounded thing. Kitty could understand that. She felt that too. But even more than that, it felt like that great pressure pressing Kitty down got harder, and more terrible, and then somehow even worse—

And then it all broke.

Like a dam suddenly exploding, and suddenly she felt almost dizzy with the release of everything that that weight had been holding in. With the ability, at last, to pull oxygen into her lungs.

And everything seemed to swirl around and around inside of her. All the things she’d always considered choices, that maybe, looking back, had been reactions after all. All the decisions she’d made, thinking always that she was bettering things for herself and her sisters. Maybe she had been. Maybe it was truly as simple as that.

But her sisters were right. She’d also done all of those things because on some level, she was always trying to prove that she was nothing like the people who’d raised them.

Her whole life was a monument to never being anything like them.

She would have said that she spent very little time at all thinking about her parents. But that was the trouble with the kind of childhood she’d had. She didn’t have to think about her parents directly. The way they’d behaved, the neglectful yet intensely toxic way they’d raised their daughters, still stood as architecture that Kitty had built her whole life on. She wasn’t sure there was any way around it.

And she didn’t have to know a damn thing about building houses to understand that it didn’t matter how pretty the house was, or how expertly constructed it might be, if the foundation sucked.

Maybe what she felt breaking apart tonight was that bedrock she hadn’t even realized she’d been standing on.

And the moment she had that thought, the only thing she could think about was Finn.