Page 128 of When Lemons Give You Life

For a moment I wonder if I’m having an episode. Turns out that ripping open decades-old trauma feels a lot like a heart attack. Everything flashes before my eyes. Dad shouting, Griff dragging me under his bed. The biscuit recipe, read in soothing tones: One cup oats, One cup flour, One cup coconut . . . I know every damn word because it was the soundtrack to my early childhood.

My hand flies over my mouth. “The Anzac recipe . . .” I gasp. “It’s all coming back. I thought I knew it because Mum baked them so often. But it wasn’t her, was it?”

A whisper of a nod. “I wasn’t sure if you remembered. I’d recite it to you under my bed when things were getting rough. Things got rough a lot. Fairy tales were always too mushy for me—I found recipes far more comforting.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, but his hands are shaking.

I reach out slowly, brushing my fingertips over the scar. “He . . . he did this?”

Griff doesn’t flinch. “And more. Until I got strong enough to make him leave.”

I stare at him, as my tears begin to fall, trying to line up the two versions of my brother and father in my head.

“He was a bad man, Lisa.”

Bad man.

Beau’s voice ripples through me—that night at the kitchen table, his eyes foggy. The bad man . . . he’s gone, but he’s still living in Griff’s head.

I’d thought he was confused. Thought he meant Griff. But he’d been trying to tell me the truth—about my dad. About what Griff carried and what I was too blind to see.

My breath catches. “I think Beau tried to bring it up, when he was sick. It didn’t make sense at the time.”

Griff closes his eyes, pain flickering across his face. “I swore him to secrecy. Told him it wasn’t his truth to share. But, god, Lisa, I was so selfish. I put him in an impossible position. He never should’ve had to bear that burden for me.”

“Why on earth would Mum keep this from me?”

“The same reason she didn’t tell you about the kidney. She thought it would protect you. That if you didn’t know, you could grow up untouched by it, with something close to a happy childhood.”

“Oh my god.”

“I know now it doesn’t work like that. Trauma’s not something you can scrape off like a burnt layer of toast. It seeps in, flavoring everything . . . even when you don’t know it’s there. We should have trusted you with the truth, Lisa.” His eyes meet mine—tired, red, and honest. “I hated what he did. And that you reminded me of him. You looked so alike. You tied us to him without even knowing it. I was hard on you because of that, and I should’ve known better. You were just a little girl. I’m so sorry.”

“You were young too, Griff. That’s a hell of a thing for Mum to ask of you.”

He blinks hard; he’s trying to hold it together, to take the comfort but not fully believing it’s his to have. “The things he said . . . I . . .” His voice trails off.

Scraps of memory appear, jagged and out of order—Mum’s voice too bright when Dad came home, Griff shouting when I tried to follow him, doors slammed, nights I lay in bed listening but not understanding. The names, the yelling: I never understood them then, but now they become clear—the way Griff’s shoulders stiffened, the way the words cut the air. I shift closer, my eyes trailing his forearm as the true depth of the trauma clicks into focus.

“Griff . . . that scar . . . it wasn’t the worst mark Brent left on you, was it?”

Griff’s face shutters closed, as if there’s more he could say but won’t.

I pull the paper from my bag. “I saw this letter, the one to Beau. It was in the viola.”

He looks away, reddening. “I never meant for you to see that.”

“It was my dad, wasn’t it—‘the voice that made you hate yourself’?”

Griff gives a shaky nod, his voice fragile, almost younger. “He made me feel like I was wrong just for existing. For who I was and who I loved. I didn’t even have the words for it back then, but he did.”

The truth strikes deep, icy and unforgiving. All these years I assumed Dad had been decent, even good, and that Griff was the problem, difficult, and unkind. My memories of Dad were patchy but sweet: him playing lions with me, picking me up, swirling me through the air. Maybe I stitched those scraps together, imagination filling in the blanks with happy scenes that never happened. And all along, he had been the one poisoning the air in our house. My stomach twists with shame. I never questioned it, never saw it. How colossally wrong I’d been.

I grab his hand. “Oh Griff, I’m so sorry! How could I have been so blind? So naive? You loved someone, and you were loved exactly as you are. That’s not wrong. That’s real and beautiful! What you and Beau had . . . it was the kind of love most people spend their lives hoping for. What my dad said, what he made you believe, that was the lie.”

Griff goes still. His eyes flick over my face like he’s trying to find the part where I take it back. “He convinced me I was the reason everything broke, that what he did to me, what he did to Mum, was punishment for my mistake. And by extension, that you were punishment.” He bites his lip, taking both my hands in his. “But you aren’t the consequence, Lisa, you were never part of what was broken. You were the proof we hadn’t been destroyed. That something beautiful, something worth loving, came out of my mistake.”

“Oh, Griff . . .” I whisper. “Your mistake?”

“Yes. I kept Mum’s secrets because I believed I owed her everything. I took the man she loved—it’s a debt I can never repay.”