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“Equally stupid, maybe?” Lo suggests, and I roll my eyes.
“How was the opening week for the bed and breakfast? And the Flower Festival?” I ask, desperate for a subject change. I’m not sure what I expected when I finally unloaded everything to my sisters. Guess I should have expected THIS.
At least now, I have Banjo. I scoop up another handful of Fruit Loops, and he holds out his grabby hands. I want a raccoon. Too bad it’s not exactly legal. At least not in Georgia. But as it turns out, a full rehabilitation wasn’t possible for Banjo, so Hunter was given a special license to keep him.
Lucky.
Knowing my uptight older sister is now a raccoon mom willnevernot seem hilarious to me. I’ll have to see if I can get a t-shirt made. She’d never wear it, but it would make me happy all the same.
“Stop trying to change the subject,” Lo says. “We’re not done scolding you.”
“It’s weird. I guess I hoped maybe I’d get some version of, ‘Well done, Sadie! Way to shut down a whole ring of human trafficking with your efforts!’ Not telling me I’m stupid.”
“Weareproud,” Lo says. “You are a rockstar, Sadie. A brave, brilliant rockstar.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“But it doesn’t mean you’re not stupid,” Merritt adds.
Sisters are so fun. Everyone should have at least two!
Under any other circumstance, I might be happy to see Lo and Mer united on a topic, as I spent much of my life playing the mediator, the go-between, the bridge between my older and younger sisters. They are North and South on a compass, two opposing ends of a magnet. And unlike yin and yang, this did not mean harmony.
Maybe living together on Oakley has shifted things between them. I wonder briefly if now I’m the odd sister out, and I don’t like the idea atall.
I mean, yay for Merritt and Eloise getting along! Boo if it’s at my expense or leaves me hanging.
Guess I could change that if I moved from Atlanta to Oakley …
I shut down that thought immediately. It comes too close to thinking about moving here to be closer to Ben. Which dances too near the realm of being like my mother, to making changes for someone else. Shedding my skin to put on someone else’s.
But also: practically speaking, I signed a two-year lease. One I could break, but it would be costly. Given the way I blew up my last government task, those might be scarce moving forward.I’m certainly not expecting a medal if German’s reaction is anything to go on.
“So, back to Ben,” Lo says. She pauses to take a bite of a saltine cracker from the sleeve of Saltines she’s holding in her lap. “I can’tbelieveyou just snuck out while he was sleeping.”
“I believe it,” Merritt says.
Man—it’s been a while since I’ve found myself on the receiving end of Merritt’s ire, and I forgot how unyielding she can be.
“It’s not like I fled the state,” I argue. “Also, aren’t you supposed to take my side? Isn’t that sister code?”
“Sister code involves taking your sister’s side when she needs it. And calling her out on her crap when she needs that. And you definitely fall into the latter category.”
I roll my eyes at Merritt’s ability to work a word likelatterinto this conversation.
“Maybe I was just in a hurry to see my sisters. Which was a perfectly natural thing to do when I came to Oakley to see you and instead spent a week in yacht prison with government agents breathing down my neck and throwing my phone into Davy Jones’s locker.”
“Oh, whatever,” Merritt says with a roll of her eyes. “You came to Oakley because a government agent said youhadto. We both knew you weren’t really planning to come to the opening.”
She pauses, letting this uncomfortable truth settle over the room, like a foul mist. Eloise won’t look at me, and for the first time, I realize how much I might have hurt my sisters by not making it a priority to be here. I can’t seem to escape my mistakes today.
“And leaving Ben’s boat at butt o’clock in the morning had nothing to do with you wanting to see us,” Merritt says. “That was about you. You and your inability to handle any relationship that progresses past surface level.”
“Mer,” Eloise chastises, but she doesn’t argue that Merritt is wrong.
I mean, how could she? Merrittisn’twrong. I’m self-aware enough to see the patterns in my own life. And to know exactly how cowardly and wrong it was to leave Ben like I did.
My older sister doesn’t apologize or back down. Instead, she sets her jaw, picks up a colorful throw pillow from the couch, and pulls it onto her lap.
