Part 2
“She was angry. She was leaning over the railing. I tried to get her back.”
Elena’s fingers moved against his chest.
“No,” she said.
The word was barely air.
Julian looked down at her. “No what?”
Her gaze drifted again, then returned to him. Her face twisted as she tried to breathe through another wave of pain.
“She said…”
Vivian’s voice cut in. “Julian, do not make her talk right now.”
The sentence was reasonable. Too reasonable.
He turned his head slowly.
The distance between him and Vivian felt larger than the height of the staircase. It was only one flight. He had climbed it every day as a boy, sometimes two steps at a time when he was late for school, sometimes dragging his hand along the smooth white railing while his mother called after him to stop leaving marks on it.
Now the staircase seemed to belong to someone else.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he said.
Vivian’s expression changed, but only slightly. A flicker. Her lips pressed together.
“I’m telling you she’s hurt.”
“She’s hurt because she fell.”
“Yes.”
“And you were there.”
“I was.”
Elena shifted against him. Julian felt the movement before he heard the small cry that escaped her.
He looked down again immediately.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“For what?”
Her mouth trembled.
Julian lowered his voice. “Elena, you don’t have to be sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
A strange look passed across her face. It seemed almost like pity.
He hated it.
The first time Elena met Vivian, she had worn a coat too thin for November and stood in this same foyer holding a paper cup of coffee that had gone cold. Julian had brought her here without warning because he had been late for dinner and had not wanted to leave her waiting at his apartment.
Vivian had come down the staircase in a cream sweater and gray trousers, carrying a leather folder under one arm. She had looked Elena over once, not cruelly, not warmly, and said, “You must be the woman who has made my brother incapable of answering a text.”
Elena had smiled.
“I didn’t know that was a family trait.”
Julian had nearly laughed. Vivian had not.
Later, in the car, Elena had said, “Your sister doesn’t hate me.”
Julian had glanced at her.
“She doesn’t?”
“No.” Elena had looked out the window. “She hates what she thinks I’ll change.”
He had asked what that meant.
Elena had shrugged. “Probably everything.”
At the time, he had dismissed it. Vivian had always been difficult. She had been difficult when their father was alive, difficult when their mother was sick, difficult after the funeral, difficult when Julian told her he was moving out of the house for good.
She had a talent for becoming the only person in a room who seemed calm, even when she was the reason no one else could breathe.
But she was his sister.
That had always meant something to him.
It meant something now, too, though he could not tell whether it was loyalty or damage.
“Elena,” he said softly. “What happened up there?”
Her eyes closed.
“Don’t,” Vivian said.
Julian did not look away from Elena. “I’m not asking you.”
Vivian let out a breath that carried more irritation than fear. “That isn’t fair.”
His head lifted.
The words entered him slowly.
Not fair.
Elena lay on the marble floor with one hand pressed against her ribs, and Vivian was worried about fairness.
Julian had spent most of his life being careful with Vivian’s feelings. He had done it without noticing. He had learned it young, before he had language for it. Their father had been loud when he was disappointed. Their mother had gotten quiet when she was sad. Vivian had gotten sharp.
Julian had been the youngest. He had been the one who made himself useful.
He had stayed out of the way. He had agreed when agreement seemed safer. He had let Vivian decide which attorney to hire after their father died, which art to sell, which rooms in the house should be kept closed. He had let her call his silence maturity.
Elena had called it something else.
“You don’t avoid fights,” she had told him once in his kitchen while rinsing a wineglass. “You just let the other person decide what the truth is.”
He had been angry then.
Not because she was wrong.
Because he had heard the sentence and known she had been watching him closely enough to say it.
The chandelier swayed almost imperceptibly above them. Light moved across Elena’s face in pale fragments.
Julian brushed a strand of hair from her cheek.
She flinched.
His hand froze.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
May you like
Her eyes opened again. “Not you.”
The words landed quietly.
