“In fact,” Bill offers, “I’d suggest that Kate is the perfect person to talk to about this.”
I stare at him, struggling to find a way to convey how impossible that is without revealing myself.
Well, you see, Bill, I’ve been a moth to the flame of your youngest daughter’s animosity for a long time, and I’ve fed it like a wildfire with the fuel of my own frustration. Because I don’t look at Kate and see her how I see your other daughters. I don’t look at her and think “sister.” I look at her and see a tumbleweed who’ll never stay in one safe place, a money-hating hellion who despises what I covet for its stability and power, a fierce, electrifying woman who could send me up in flames if I got too close.
“Whether you talk to her or not,” Bill says, reading my disdain for this idea in my pinched expression, “how you two interact has to change.”
Dread seeps through my system. “Change? How?”
“I need you to make peace, Christopher,” Bill says, holding my eyes. “I know Katerina isn’t the . . . tamest of personalities, that you and she don’t have the most commonality to bring you together, but I believe you both have the capacity to be kinder to each other. You can get along well enough that holidays and homecomings don’t turn into a war zone with everyone who loves you both caught in the cross fire.”
“Does Kate know you feel this way?” I ask. “Is she getting the same speech?”
Bill adjusts his glasses. “No.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because”—he smiles gently—“I know my daughter. And I know that she cannot be told to reexamine something or change her perception; she must be shown and . . . perhaps . . . led, without her precisely knowing.”
“You mean deceived?”
His smile fades. “Would it be a deception if you were simply gentler to her? Kinder to her? If you tried to make amends? Would it matter who started it, when all’s well that ends well?”
“I can see it mattering to Kate very much.”
He searches my eyes. “Then perhaps you’ll find a way to tell her the truth—that you didn’t know how damaging your dynamic was until others helped you recognize it.”
His words land like a blow to the gut, knocking the wind out of me. It’s never gone that far, has it? Our dynamic’s damaged her? Feisty, fiery, tough-as-nails Kate? With a few honest words, the natural clash between our personalities, innocuous years spent ignoring her when she was young, then keeping my distance once she was grown up?
I’ve wanted distance from Kate. I’ve wanted to feel indifferent to her. Never to hurt her.
I can’t have hurt her, can I?
“I think you’re wrong,” I tell him.
Bill’s smile returns again, tinged with amusement. “Maybe I am. Or maybe you’re wrong. You’ll figure it out soon enough, if you do what we’ve asked and try to make things right.”
“？‘Make things right.’？” I sigh as I massage my temples, which have begun to thud dully.
“Talk to her,” Bill says. “And then listen to her.”
“How about I just keep a low profile until she’s gone?” I offer, knowing I sound desperate, but too desperate to care. “She’ll leave soon. She always does.”
Bill shrugs. “She might leave. Or she might stay awhile. Who knows.”
My stomach drops. How am I supposed to share a city with that woman when I can barely survive her typical four-day visits? We haven’t regularly coexisted in the same hemisphere since I was eighteen and she was twelve. Back then I was a teen on the verge of adulthood, Kate a kid who delighted in my annoyance. She’d jump out of tight corners to scare the shit out of me, stick fake spiders in my shoes, give me wet willies while I did homework at the Wilmots’， desperate for the comfort of a homemade meal and a parent to ask the occasional question. She was a menace whom I menaced right back, six-year age difference be damned.
Kate was still that menacing little girl when I left for college and stayed away all four years, letting my grandmother live her best cranky life alone in my childhood home. I rented an apartment with the disgusting amount of money left to me by my parents after their death and hid from the Wilmots. Because two days into being at college in the city, I realized how badly I missed them. And I feared what missing them meant—that they mattered to me, that I loved them, that I could lose them, and it would crush me. I’d sworn to myself after I lost my parents that I would never love and lose again. Distance was my only coping strategy.