The day she stopped waiting

Chapter 1

The cake had twenty-six candles.

Lydia counted them from across the dining room. She could see them flickering through the cracked kitchen door while she stood in the hallway, still in her coat, still holding the small bouquet of grocery-store flowers she had bought for herself because she knew she always knew that no one else would think to.

Twenty-six candles.

None of them were for her.

She pushed open the door anyway. The dining room smelled like garlic bread and expensive wine, and for exactly three seconds, Lydia told herself that maybe she was wrong. Maybe this time was different. Maybe they had remembered.

"Lydia! You're late." Her mother, Patricia, glanced up from the head of the table with that particular look. Not angry. Just mildly inconvenienced, the way she'd look if Lydia had knocked over a glass of water instead of walked into her own birthday dinner.

"Traffic," Lydia said.

She set her coat on the chair by the door. No one offered to take it.

The table was full. Her father, Gerald, sat at the other end, already halfway through his second glass of red wine, deep in conversation with Uncle Bart about the stock market. Her cousin Mira was on her phone. Aunt Helen was refilling the bread basket. And Daniel — her fiancé, the man she was supposed to marry in seven months was laughing at something on the far left side of the table.

Laughing at something Selene had said.

Selene. Her adopted sister. Selene, with her honey-blonde hair and her easy laugh and the way she tilted her head when she talked to men, like every word they said was the most interesting thing she had ever heard in her life. She had this gift. This completely natural, completely unfair gift of making everyone in the room feel like the most important person there. Everyone except Lydia, who always just felt like the person standing at the edge of the room trying to figure out how to get to the center.

Lydia sat down in the one empty chair. It was squeezed between Aunt Helen and a potted plant.

She unfolded her napkin.

No one sang Happy Birthday.

Not at the start of dinner. Not in the middle. Not when dessert came out which was a lemon tart that Lydia happened to know was Selene's favorite, not hers. Lydia's favorite was chocolate. She had mentioned this approximately a hundred times over the years. It had never once mattered.

She ate quietly. She answered the few questions directed at her. How's work. How's the apartment. Are you still doing that thing with the marketing firm. She smiled and nodded and said everything was fine, wonderful, going well. She had been saying those words for so long they came out automatically now, like breathing.

It was Gerald who finally remembered. Sort of.

"Oh Lydia." He looked up from his wine glass at the end of the meal, forehead creasing. "Isn't it your birthday this week?"

"It's today," she said.

A beat of silence. Patricia looked up. A few cousins glanced over.

"Well happy birthday, sweetheart." Gerald lifted his wine glass in a vague toast.

"Happy birthday," a few voices echoed. Scattered and polite. The same energy as saying bless you when someone sneezes. Automatic. Meaningless.

The conversation moved on.

Daniel didn't say anything. He was laughing again. Selene had said something funny she was always saying something funny and his whole face had lit up the way it used to light up for Lydia, back in the very beginning. Back when he'd shown up at her door with handpicked wildflowers and a nervous smile and she had thought: this one. This is the one who will stay.

Lydia put down her fork.

She looked at the lemon tart on her plate. She looked at the decorative candles on the centerpiece just candles, nothing to do with birthdays. She looked at the faces of the people who shared her last name and she felt something she couldn't quite name. Not sadness. Not anger. Something quieter than both. Something that had been building for years.

She had been gone for three years as a child.

That was the part of the story nobody talked about at dinner tables anymore. But it was always there, underneath everything, like a crack in a foundation. Lydia had been seven years old when it happened taken from the front yard of the Mercer house on a Tuesday afternoon, the kind of ordinary Tuesday that had no business changing everything. She was found three years later, ten years old, in a house two states away. When she came back, the family had already reorganized itself around her absence.

They had already adopted Selene.

Selene, who was eight when she came to the Mercer family. Selene, who had charmed Patricia within a week and had Gerald wrapped around her finger within a month. Selene, who slept in Lydia's bedroom while Lydia was gone and had somehow, quietly, permanently, taken up residence in everyone's heart.

When Lydia came back, she had expected to step back into her old life. She had not understood, at ten years old, that her old life had been remodeled without her.

There was always a reason why Selene came first. Selene was going through something. Selene needed support right now. Selene was more sensitive, more delicate, more in need of protection than capable, sturdy, resilient Lydia, who had survived worse and could handle it.

Lydia had been surviving ever since.

She pushed back her chair. "I'll help with the dishes," she said to no one in particular.

In the kitchen, with her hands under warm water and the noise of the dining room muffled behind the door, she finally let herself breathe. Just breathe. In and out. The kind of breathing that is really crying held very still.

She was twenty-six years old.

She had been waiting her whole life to feel like she belonged here.

Standing at that sink, suds up to her wrists, she had a thought she immediately tried to push away. But it came back, slow and clear as a tide coming in: What if she never would?

She dried her hands. She went back out. She smiled when Daniel finally kissed her cheek and said "happy birthday, Ly" with the ease of someone who had almost forgotten and was relieved to have remembered just in time.

"Thanks," she said.

Selene squeezed her hand across the table. "Happy birthday, sister." Her eyes were warm. Her smile was perfect. She had always been so genuinely warm that it made everything harder, because Lydia could never quite decide what was real and what was something Selene just did naturally, like breathing.

"Thanks," Lydia said again.

She drove home alone that night. She put her grocery-store flowers in a vase on the kitchen counter. She sat on the edge of her bed in her coat and stared at the wall for a long time.

Then she opened her journal and wrote three words at the top of a clean page:

How much longer?

She didn't have an answer. She closed the journal. She turned off the light.

Outside, the city hummed on, indifferent and alive. Lydia Mercer lay in the dark and counted the years she had been waiting to matter.