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“That’s not all I brought,” Corbin said, shoulders back as he moved aside. Even though I’d been warned, I almost dropped my flowers. Tiffany stood behind him clutching a Louis Vuitton purse to her hip. The kitchen went silent. In a short denim skirt and Rocket Dogs, she dressed the part of the girl who’d stolen Manning out from under me, but she didn’t look the same. Eight years had passed since I’d watched her leave for her honeymoon, and she was a thirty-year-old divorcée now.
She took a few steps into the kitchen, her eyes bouncing from Val and Corbin back to me. She’d never had much trouble handling a roomful of people, but she looked a little out of her element.
I couldn’t quite gauge her mood—or my own. It wasn’t as if I never wondered about seeing her. In fact, I thought about it often, especially when I was at my most vulnerable. Right before I’d moved here, I’d almost picked up the phone to ask her if it was the right choice, but what answer could she have possibly given? Aside from a few short phone calls over the years, I’d told her next to nothing about my life. After I’d lost Manning, in some of my darkest moments, I’d wished I could escape into her bedroom for a few hours where she’d play Soundgarden too loud and pet me and tell me things would get better once I understood boys. Well, here we were, almost a decade later, and I still didn’t understand boys.
“I can’t believe you’re going to be on TV,” she said.
I couldn’t say I understood her, either, or most of the things I was supposed to by twenty-six years old. I was an adult now, and I should’ve known what to say to my own sibling, but I just gaped at her. Maybe that was why she’d come. To see her sister on TV.
“And . . . I can’t believe you’re standing in front of me,” she added.
For all the ups and downs we’d had, she was familiar. She was home. I wanted to hug her. She wore shoes higher than mine, her top showed more cleavage than the ultimate Wonderbra could bless me with, and her beauty—her curled blonde hair and impeccable smoky eyes—outshone anyone else’s in the room. And that was exactly what I needed in that moment—to be a kid again, hidden in her older sister’s shadow, shielded from the attention the people in the next room were trying to give me. That was the thing nobody but my mom had ever seemed to notice, especially not Tiffany—I hadn’t minded being in my sister’s shadow all that much, not until Manning had come along.
Corbin took my bouquet and leaned between us. “This is where you hug.”
We put our arms around each other. She hugged the same. Smelled the same. But there was no possible way she could be the same after what she’d been through. “I’m sorry about the baby,” I whispered into her hair.
She nodded against me. “Me too.”
I’d called after the miscarriage, but neither of us had been in a position to have a conversation longer than a few minutes. I’d gripped the receiver in my hand, tears streaming down my face since the moment my mom had called from the hospital. And as Tiffany had taken my condolences, her grief flowing through the phone, I’d felt him there in the background. I hadn’t asked to speak to Manning. What was there to say?
This was the first time I’d gotten to tell Tiffany in person. Maybe it was overdue, but I pulled back and looked her in the face. “I’m genuinely sorry. I hope you know that,” I said, and it was true. But I couldn’t offer my regrets that she and Manning hadn’t made it. I was sorry for what they’d been through, and that it’d gotten so bad that, according to my mom, the miscarriage had caused their split, but knowing she no longer had him—no, I couldn’t be the least bit sorry about that.
“I can’t really talk about it.” She glanced at the floor but then back up quickly, her eyes glittering. “Were those photographers out front?”
“Paparazzi.” My stomach churned with the word. “They’ve started following some of us the last few weeks.”
“Seriously?” Tiffany asked.
“They might try to take your picture,” I warned, even though I knew that could cause her to run out front, waving her arms. “I talk about you and Dad a little on the show.”
“What? That’s so freaking awesome.”
“It’s not, trust me,” I said. “If I so much as stumble, they catch it. If the film crew doesn’t, then the paparazzi will.”
“Oh, how utterly mortifying.” She shifted feet. “Is there anything to drink?”
“If I know Val, there’s a roomful of rosé on the other side of that wall,” Corbin said. “Come on.”
