She didn’t see him for the remainder of the day.
He had come to dinner, as their agreement dictated, but there was none of the ease that had appeared between him and Clio the night before. Instead, he treatedherlike a near-stranger, too. He spoke perhaps ten words the entire meal, and the moment that he finished eating, he excused himself and left.
Clio sighed at his retreating back.
“You can’t blame him,” she said quietly without meeting Phoebe’s eyes, at least not at first.
“I could, actually,” Phoebe said mildly. “But I won’t. At least not yet. I just… wish I understood.”
Clio toyed with her spoon for a moment, dragging it through the remnants of the trifle on her plate.
“I would have preferred it for him to be the one to tell you,” she said. “I thought… When I heard that he had gotten married, I wondered if maybe he had…”
“That he’d fallen in love, and it had changed him?” Phoebe supplied, trying not to sound bitter. It wasn’t that she wanted Aaron to love her—or that she would ever consider that such a thing was possible—but it would have been nice if he considered their marriage enough reason to at leastspeakto her.
“I’m sorry,” she told Clio. “It’s—it isn’t like that between us.”
Clio hummed, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.
“The thing to understand about Aaron,” she said, putting her spoon down in a resolved sort of way, “is that he was just the second son.”
Phoebe felt an outraged sound come out of her at this description, one that she made entirely without thought.
For some reason, this made Clio smile.
“That’s how my parents felt,” she clarified. “As my stories last night no doubt revealed, I doted on Aaron when I was a child. I adored him. But my parents—and Peter…” She sighed. “They wanted Aaron to be prepared to step into Peter’s shoes, which obviously was eventually needed, but they also didn’t want to…bother with him unless that need arose. Which, of course, nobody wanted—not even Aaron.”
Clio was being circumspect, but Phoebe could read through the lines. After all, hadn’t she spent her own childhood in much of the same situation? Her father had wanted her around whenHannah needed someone to fill the shoes of a mother, but otherwise, he wanted her to remain entirely out of sight.
“I see,” she said. “Let me guess. They wanted him to follow orders without question, bring honor to the family, and never put up a fuss about anything?”
Clio gave her a sympathetic look, one that was full of understanding but not pity.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s precisely it. And then… he went to war.”
The two women sat in silence, mulling over all the implications of this.
Phoebe knew that she could never understand her husband’s experience in the Navy. She didn’t need to understand war to understand the look in Aaron’s eye that he got sometimes—the far-off look of someone who was being dragged back into their worst moments. Phoebe had seen that look in the mirror when she thought about her mother, but Aaron’s version was… more.
“Is he different now than when he first returned?” she asked. She didn’t know if the pain of battle faded similarly to the way that the pain of grief did—never fading away but becoming muted until it was just part of the background of everyday life. Always there but only noticeable when one took a moment to stop and think about it.
But Clio didn’t seem to know any better than Phoebe did, at least judging by her unhappy shrug.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He sent me away.”
There was a cavernous sadness beneath this simple statement, too, and Phoebe felt an ache in her chest about howlonelythey all had been. She, trying to make up for the loss of her mother so that Hannah didn’t have to hurt as she did. Aaron, constantly being told he was second best—unwanted until the worst happened, and he was needed. And Clio, sent away so she wouldn’t see her brother’s scars, only to bear the invisible scars of rejection.
“I’m sorry,” she said, knowing it was far from enough.
“Me too,” Clio said, reaching down to play with her spoon some more.
Phoebe realized something, watching Clio fidget and try to hide all the ways she’d been hurt: she knew how to be a sister. She had no idea how to be a wife, but she had spent her whole life working to be the best sister she could be. She knew how to reach Hannah when Hannah was being stubborn and irritating. She knew when to give her space and when to give a very necessary nudge.
Which meant that she could help Clio and Aaron. She didn’t know how to help herself, not in terms of the excruciating discomfort that was her current marital relations, but she knew she could help the brother and sister find one another.
That wasn’t nothing. That mattered.
“It will get better,” she promised Clio.
