Page 2 of The Next Lie

I lift my hand anyway. My body moves before my brain catches up. My fingers stretch toward her sleeve, toward proof, toward skin and bone and heat.

“Deedy…you’re alive.”

Tears spill down my face. I don’t feel them at first. I only know they’re there because my lips taste salt when I breathe through my mouth.

“You’re alive,” I say again, and this time the words come with a sound I hate. A cracked, ugly thing. Almost a laugh. Almost a sob. “How are you—how are you standing here?”

My fingers brush her arm. Delia jerks away.

She pulls back so hard her shoulder hits the edge of a narrow table behind her. A glass wobbles. Someone grabs it before it spills. Delia doesn’t notice. Her eyes are locked on my hand.

The floor drops beneath me. I’m still standing, but something inside me falls.

“It’s Delia,” she says. “Not Deedy.”

It’s no more than a whisper, but it may as well be a shout.

I stare at her.

I have imagined finding my family in every impossible way grief knows how to imagine. I have dreamed of my mother opening a door with flour on her hands. My father sitting at the kitchen table, newspaper folded beside his coffee. Delia flopping onto my bed and telling me my hair looks stupid.

I’ve imagined so many different scenarios, they all started to blend together in the purest form of torture.

I have not imagined my sister looking at me as if my touch burns.

“Delia,” I reply.

Her jaw tightens. Her gaze cuts to Deacon one more time, and whatever passes between them makes my stomach fold in on itself.

“I don’t know what this is, but I can’t do this,” she says.

The words are controlled. Too controlled. She sounds like someone reading a line she has practiced until it stops cutting her mouth.

“What?” I shake my head. “No. No, you don’t get to⁠—”

“You can’t be here.”

My pulse hammers so hard my vision flickers at the edges.

“I can’t be here?” I repeat. “You’re dead.”

Something moves across her face. Pain, maybe. But it is gone before I can hold it still long enough to name.

“You should never have come.”

The room narrows around us.

“What does that even mean?” Anger is rising in counterpoint to the pain, and I swipe it aside.

She looks at me then. Really looks. For the first time since I saw her across the room, her eyes meet mine and stay there.

My sister’s eyes used to be warm brown. I remember them that way. Warm. Impatient. Alive with every thought she wasn’t supposed to say out loud.

These eyes are brown too, but there is nothing warm in them.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” she hisses.

Then she turns and walks away.