When Beth was that angry, she was terrifying.
I was on the right track, which meant the answers were there. I just had to figure out where they were.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
October 2017
SHEA
My sister was the executive assistant to a bank CEO, which was where she met her husband, one of the bank’s lawyers. She and Will lived in one of the new low-rise condo buildings downtown, not far from the waterfront, in a neighborhood that had been built for well-to-do people like them. When I arrived for dinner, Esther answered the door in linen pants and a blouse that would have cost a month of our father’s salary growing up. By contrast, I was wearing dark jeans, a black tee, sneakers, and a stretched-out black hoodie, my hair in a ponytail. I looked like I’d just finished prowling the neighborhood, staring into everyone’s windows, but Esther made no comment.
We probably shouldn’t have liked each other, Esther and me. We were so different, even though we had the same black hair and dark eyes. Esther wore her hair in a fashionable layered cut that ended at her chin and looked amazing on her, and I left mine long and usually tied back. We probably should have hated each other, but we’d never quite managed it. We’d been through too much together.
Will gave me a hug in greeting. He smelled like aftershave and men’s deodorant, scents I wasn’t familiar with anymore. “It’s so good to see you,” he said.
I handed him the bottle of wine I’d brought, warm from my lap, where I’d held it on the bus. “It’s good to see you, too.”
In her early twenties, before Will, Esther had dated a man who hit her. I’d helped her leave him, packing a U-Haul in the middle of the day while her boyfriend was at work, shoving garbage bags of her belongings into the trailer as fast as we could. We may be very different now, years later—Esther successful and put-together, me a divorced wreck—but we still had the experience of the garbage bags in the U-Haul, of me sleeping with her those first nights in her rented apartment, eating Pringles out of a tube for dinner. When you share something like that with your sister, it never leaves you, for better or for worse.
Will went to the dining room to set the table, and I followed Esther into the kitchen, where she put my bottle of wine in her fridge and pulled an already-chilled bottle from an ice bucket. “Thank you for actually coming,” she said.
“Thank you for not setting me up with Will’s coworker.”
She gave me a tight smile. “You scared me off that one,” she said. “Well done. How was your day?”
I had gone to lunch with an infamous possible serial killer, but I looked at my sister and I couldn’t bring that up. For once, I didn’t want to talk about murder. “It was fine,” I said. “Same old, really.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You should get a promotion in that job. You’ve been there long enough. Supervisor or manager of the office. Or better yet, get out of there entirely. It’s a dead end. You don’t need some high-powered career, but you could definitely do better than that place.”
Extra money would be nice, I agreed, but the thought of moving up and managing other people gave me hives. “If something promising comes up, I’ll let you know.”
“You’re humoring me.” Esther scooped tetrazzini into bowls and chopped a garnish to put on top of it. “You don’t want to argue, so you’re saying what I want to hear.”
I was doing exactly that, but I didn’t want to fight. “Have you heard from Mom and Dad?”
“I talked to them yesterday. You should visit them. It’s nice in Florida this time of year.”
“Esther, it’s literally hurricane season.”
I got another tight smile, because despite her lecturing, my sister had a sense of humor. “Okay, then, you could call them more often. Or ever.”