What was I supposed to say to that?
I told her to go fuck herself. Shoved passed her with all my self-righteous rage. Stumbled.
I remember the feeling of falling, the loss of gravity, the way the gleaming white tabletop seemed to rush up and meet my hands. I remember the table jolting. The slow-motion horror of what came next. The sound of something shattering. Kate’s pale, shocked face. The heat of a hundred pairs of eyes all suddenly trained on me.
And when I finally righted myself and blinked away the confusion, Kate’s sculptures lay in pieces on the floor.
I tried to pick up the broken shards. Tried to apologize. But all Kate said to me was, “Go. Please, Lizzy. Just go.”
Rachel tried to comfort her, but Kate pushed her away, too. At the time, it’d given me a small, private thrill.
“I don’t want you here,” Kate said. “Either of you.”
It was the last time I’d spoken to either of my sisters. Three years passed in silence.
Even now, stuck together at what Rachel calls ground zero, we still haven’t been able to talk about it. About the past. About anything.
But we can’t keep pretending. Lies and coverups are the whole reason we’re in this mess in the first place.
There’s so much I want to say—I’m sorry. That night is my biggest regret. Why did you let me think I was crazy for believing Helena? Can you and Kate ever truly forgive me? Are we still a family?
But the only question that comes out is, “After the gallery… When did you and Kate finally reconnect?”
“It was about a year later,” Rachel says. “I knew she needed time and space. I didn’t want to push her. She reached out when she was ready. It took a lot of long, heartfelt conversations to get back to a semblance of a relationship, and honestly, we’re still not totally there.”
It’s a gut punch. Tears prick my eyes. A year after the gallery. So for two years, my sisters have carried on without me.
I’m not angry—I can’t be. It’s not like I made any effort to reach out after that first week, when my calls and texts to Kate went unanswered. But a deep sadness opens up inside me, filled with the time we missed. TimeImissed, and I’ll never get back.
“For what it’s worth,” Rachel says, “I wanted to reach out. So many times, Lizzy. Kate wasn’t ready—I don’t think she was ready until the moment you stepped into the kitchen that first night, and she saw you again after all those years, and the old grudges just sort of… melted away.”
“So why didn’t you get in touch? What stopped you?”
“I was avoiding this exact conversation. I knew you’d have more questions about Mom—questions I couldn’t answer. All through your childhood, I tried to shield you from it. Tried to, like,beyour mom. At least, be an adult you could actually rely on. I took it personally that you still wanted to see her after everything…” She presses her lips together, shakes her head. “God, I was so immature. Jealous. Pissed off that the woman who drop-kicked us out of her life was even a thought in your mind. Deep down, I think it made me feel like nothing I did was good enough.”
The weight of it hits me, a wrecking ball to the chest. My mother wanted to protect us from her magical legacy, but in exchange, she left us this immense hole, a loss that can never be filled. Adult responsibilities we never should’ve had to bear. The fracturing of our sisterhood. All the unanswered why-why-whys, and blame that had nowhere to go but back to each other.
Tears burn my throat. When I speak again, it’s only a whisper. “Why were you always so fucking hard on me, Rachel? Why are youstillso hard on me?”
“Because when I see you in pain, when I see you struggling or being reckless, I don’t see it asyourfailure. I see it as mine. In every one of your so-called mistakes, I see all the ways I’ve let you down. All the ways I didn’t protect you. Didn’t step up whenyou needed me. Judged you when I should’ve been guiding you. And I don’t know how to forgive myself for that.“
“That was never your job. It was Mom’s, and?—”
“She abandoned us. What was I supposed to do, Lizzy? Let what was left of our family shatter? Someone had to keep us together, and you and Kate were too young to know how.”
“So were you.”
Rachel dashes away a tear. Through a sad smile, she whispers, “Maybe.”
We sip our hot chocolate in silence, the past gathered close, hovering like ghosts we can’t see.
“I want you to know something.” Rachel turns to me once more, her eyes sincere, her smile warming. “For all that I’ve been hard on you… I’ve always admired you. Your spirit. Your energy. You see something you want and you just… you go for it. You were like that even as a kid. You’re brave and wild and a little bit crazy, in the best way, and as much as it terrifies me and frustrates me to no end, I wouldn’t change any of it.”
“You wouldn’t?”
Rachel shakes her head. “What happened tonight… it’s not your fault. I’m the one who refused to listen. Who carried on with that fucking slimeball lawyer even after the way he treated you.”
“You couldn’t have known he was a demon. None of us knew. Not even the actual demons helping us.”
