Page 11 of Twisting Beauty

I kept my head down. “Yes, Father.”

“Butter my roll.”

I reached for it. My knife caught the edge of the plate as I lifted it, a slight rattle, and the pain across my ribs flared sharp enough that I had to breathe through it.

Alistair watched me, no doubt filing away every flinch as yet another sign that his only son was weak. A complete disappointment.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said while I buttered, “about the gift of clarity. The way direct feedback sharpens a man’s focus considerably.” He took a slow sip of wine. “I find that to be true in business. Equally true at home.”

The butter knife was steady in my hand as I set the roll down on his side plate, a thin and level layer of butter on each side.

“I imagine you’ve found this afternoon’s lesson clarifying.”

“Yes, sir.” Nothing more. Anything else would invite another correction.

He studied me, like he was checking his work. Making sure his adjustment held.

Humiliation burned through me but I buried it. I made myself blank and unreadable until he nodded slightly and reached for his glass again.

“Good,” he said. “Then we understand each other.”

We sat in silence for a moment, deliberate and unhurried. Then, without altering his tone at all, he said, “Rua will be joining us shortly.”

My attention sharpened.

I kept my voice even. “I didn’t know she was coming home.”

Alistair lifted up his wineglass and paused. The kind of pause Alistair made when he was selecting an answer.

“Her return was always planned,” he said and took a slow sip.

I picked up my glass and said nothing, but I filed it away. Rua’s return had surprised him too.

Suspicion coiled in me and my focus was pulled toward the door. My fingers curled tight around my glass stem.

She was becoming an unwanted, irritating nuisance. I would have to deal with it.

My back throbbed with every breath. My father sat six feet to my left, his face showing nothing of the afternoon. And somewhere on the other side of the door, the girl claiming to be my sister was about to walk in and sit across from me.

I set my jaw and took a controlled breath.

The door opened.

My attention snapped to her as she entered, not a trace of hesitation on her face.

The clothes were Rua’s. The fit wasn’t. The black top stretched tight across her chest in a way that it never did on Rua. The fabric strained at the buttons not because she’d planned it, but because the body beneath the clothes was suddenly impossible to ignore.

She wore no thick liner. No dark-red mouth. No brittle effort to look harder than she was. Without all that makeup, she looked younger, fresher, more alive.

The difference unsettled me because it made her look less like the ghost of the sister I remembered and more like a stranger wearing her face.

She moved around the table and took her seat across from me, and for a moment the only sound was the quiet arrangement of her napkin and the light clink of her water glass.

Alistair lowered his head.

I lowered my own, ignoring the pull of damaged skin across my upper back.

Across the table, Rua snatched her hand back from her fork and followed. Like she’d remembered our family’s ritual, half a beat too late.