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Instead of agreeing, instead of allowing the subject to rest, Tansy turned to the side and tucked one of her legs up under the other.
“I need to ask you something seriously,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“You know you’re not like Dad, right?”
I stared at the albums. Didn’t answer.
She shoved at my arm. “Burke.”
Glancing over at my sister, I tried desperately to keep the crawling, anxious sensation under my skin to a minimum.
Her eyes widened. “Holy shit, Burke, you are so not Dad. You’re the opposite of him.”
My heart was in knots at how sure she was. And my voice was ragged when I asked, “How do you figure?”
“Because I have a lifetime of proof.” She laid her hand on my arm so that I wouldn’t look away. “When he all but ignored me, you were the one who showed up for things. You’d come to art shows and concerts and musicals, straight from games and practices and training. You’d stay up until the middle of the night to get your own homework done after you’d helped me with mine.”
Her eyes were pleading, her grip impossibly tight. “You are one of the most unselfish people I’ve ever met, for dozens of reasons that go far beyond what you did for me. And Dad was ...” Her voice trailed off. She paused to gather herself. “Dad may have loved Mom a lot, and missed her even more than that, but he never stopped to consider the effect of his decisions on us. Not once.Allyou do is consider other people. That’s the difference.”
“I still don’t know how to handle all this”—I tapped my chest—“guilt. How I reacted when I got the house. How selfish it all sounds now that it’s almost done. I carried Dad’s dream for my entire life because it felt like the only way to make him happy, and once that was over—I had no break from that. The second they told me about that house, Chris and Amie’s dream replaced Dad’s.”
“And you’ve been honoring that,” she said. “You’ve done an amazing job with the house.”
I shook my head. “I started imagining it as mine. Mine and hers. I stood outside it before I left—right where Chris told me how much it would mean to him to take care of this place for his family someday—and I realized I was staring up at a house that looked more like me and Charlotte than Chris and Amie.”
She took a deep breath. “And what’s so wrong with that?” she asked carefully.
My eyes locked on the envelope. Still sealed.
It had taken days to figure out exactly why that letter terrified me so much. My chest throbbed dully as the words finally came up.
“What if he left it to me because he knew that I was the only person who could handle doing all this for someone else? What if he knew I was theonlypersonwho could handle putting in all that work, all that sacrifice, for something I didn’t really love? For years, he marveled at my ability to do such a hard job when I didn’t really enjoy it. What if that’s why he picked me? Because he trusted me not to get attached to it?”
“Oh, Burke.” She sighed.
“All week, I have dreamed about me and her and that house. Building the kind of life that I never saw for myself.” I pinched my eyes shut.
It was always the same.
We were in the upstairs bedroom: Bright, sunny walls. A four-poster bed. A deep-blue velvet chair and ottoman in the corner. A long, low shelf filled with the colorful spines of books.
And propped up against the headboard, I sat with Charlotte’s back to my chest. She was always settled between my legs, my arms wrapped around her. She was soft and warm, her skin smooth and her weight comforting against me.
In my dream, my hand coasted over her pregnant belly. And just before I woke, a small voice yelled my name, footsteps pounding down the hallway.
I never saw who called me Daddy. Never knew if it was a boy or a girl, red hair or brown.
But I didn’t want to tell my sister any of that.
She couldn’t fix this for me.
I needed to make peace with the things I wanted, no matter what that letter said.
“For the last two weeks, I have been trying to figure out where the balance is,” I told her. “How do I reconcile that I fell in love with that place when it might be the exact opposite thing my friend needed me to do.”
She was quiet for a moment. “And Charlotte?”
