Twisted Vows

The Lockhart mansion had been humming since seven o’clock, and by ten, it had reached the pitch my family liked best. Expensive laughter. Polished voices. People saying darling like they meant it and smiling like they didn’t. Crystal clinked. Names were dropped. Someone laughed too loudly at one of my father’s jokes, which meant he was either important or wanted to be. My parents moved through the crowd the way they moved through everything: smooth, calm, and completely in charge. I stood near the far window with a glass I hadn’t touched and watched the party happen without me. I was good at disappearing at parties like this. I’d had practice. The evening was supposed to be a celebration of endings and beginnings. Jacob stepping into his father’s company. Lizzie graduating law school. Both of them stepping into the kind of lives Dallas families planned before the children in question learned to spell their own last names. There was something smaller attached to the night too. Me. I had graduated high school earlier that summer. I had been accepted to UT Austin. I was leaving in two weeks to study social work, which I had chosen myself, quietly, without asking anyone’s opinion, because asking in this house meant giving people a chance to tell you why you were wrong. No one had mentioned it. I hadn’t expected them to. That was how things worked in our house, even if no one said it out loud. Lizzie stood near the fireplace in a dress the color of champagne, Daniel beside her, both of them glowing with the easy confidence people had when nobody had ever made them wonder whether they belonged. Guests circled them. My mother touched Lizzie’s arm and laughed at something she said. A real laugh. Bright. Easy. Unguarded. I watched from across the room and felt the old ache settle behind my ribs. I knew that laugh. I had just never been the one to cause it. My mother had found me before the party began. I had been standing in the hallway in an emerald dress Olivia had talked me into. “It makes your eyes brighter, Lee,” Olivia had said. “Trust me.” I was doing one last check in the mirror, trying to believe I looked fine. The dress nipped in at my waist and flared softly over my hips. I had spent forty minutes on my hair, and for once, I thought it looked almost intentional. Then my mother appeared in the reflection behind me. Her gaze moved over me slowly. Up. Down. The pause came next. It always did. That little breath before the cut, so everyone could pretend she had tried to choose kindness first. “Couldn’t you wear something more polished?” she asked. I went still. She sounded gentle. That was how she got away with it. “And that hair,” she said, studying me in the mirror. “So vivid. You’d look so much better if you softened the color.” There wasn’t much I could do about being a redhead. That had never stopped my mother from acting like it was a choice I’d made to embarrass her. Her eyes flicked down, then back up. “Something not so tight would be more appropriate,” she said. “You don’t want to draw the wrong kind of attention.” My chest tightened. “It’s not tight,” I said quietly. “It’s fitted.” She paused again. There it was. The kindness she wanted credit for not using. “You know,” she said softly, “Lizzie would never have chosen that color. She understands what suits her. What the occasion calls for.” I looked at her in the mirror. Her expression stayed patient. Almost sad. As if my dress had disappointed her personally. “It’s something you learn,” she said. “In time.” She had been saying versions of that my whole life. Not always in words. Sometimes it was a look. A pause before my name, as if she had to remind herself to say it at all. The way she introduced Lizzie at parties as “my daughter, Elizabeth,” and then turned to me with something that stopped just short of warmth. “And this is Leah.” Not my daughter Leah. Just Leah. Like I was a line on a program she had to read out loud. I had been seven the first time I properly understood it. I had stood in the hallway outside the kitchen and listened to her laugh at something Daniel said. A real laugh. Her hand on his arm. Her face open in a way it never was for me. I remember thinking, I could go in. I could say something funny. I was funny sometimes. So I went in. The laughter stopped. That was the lesson. Eleven years later, she was still teaching it. I gave her a small nod. “Yes, Mom,” I said. Her mouth eased, satisfied. I let the ache settle where it always did. Everywhere. Quietly. By the time Jacob tried to propose to Lizzie, I was already in the library. I heard it secondhand, a hush moving through the party. I did not need to see it. I had been expecting it. Everyone had been expecting it. What I had not expected was how badly it would hurt. I sat on the floor of the library with my back against the leather sofa and told myself it was fine. He was Lizzie’s boyfriend. He had always been Lizzie’s boyfriend. The fact that he was the only person in this house who had ever looked at me and seemed to see someone there was not his fault. The fact that he asked my opinion, made room for my voice, laughed at something I said without sounding like he was doing charity work was not his problem. It was mine. I had a crush on him. No. That was the safe word for it. I loved him. I’d had a crush on Jacob Fairfax since I was fifteen and he spent an entire car ride back from a Lockhart-Fairfax ski trip asking me what I wanted to study. Not asking because he was polite. Asking because he actually wanted to hear the answer. I’d wanted him in the careful, private way you wanted people who were completely unavailable. Alone. Quietly. Never where anyone could see. I wasn’t sure when it had turned into love. He had tried to propose to my sister. A photo album sat open on the coffee table. I had been looking through it before the quiet fell, a habit from childhood, searching family photographs like they might finally prove I had been there. The images were mostly what I expected. Lockharts and Fairfaxes at holidays. Summers at the lake house. Birthday parties. Christmas mornings. Pretty little pieces of a life I had only half belonged to. I was in a lot of them. At the edge. Slightly blurred. Half a step behind whoever the picture was really for. Even in photographs, I knew where to stand. I found the Christmas photograph around the same time I found the whiskey. It was tucked into the middle of an album from three years ago. The Fairfax lake house. A Christmas trip I remembered clearly. Pine. Woodsmoke. Cold air coming in every time someone opened the back door. Everyone happy in that easy way our family rarely managed. I remembered the sweater I’d worn. Pale blue, itchy at the collar. I remembered sitting on the floor by the tree because all the couch space had been taken. I remembered looking up when someone said everyone look. I remembered smiling. I was not in the photograph. Not blurred. Not half hidden. Gone. The couch was full. Lizzie was laughing. Daniel had one arm around her shoulders. Jacob stood behind them, smiling at something outside the frame. My parents stood together in the center. And the space where I had been was just carpet. I sat with that for a while. Then I opened the whiskey. It was a decent single malt. My father kept it in the library cabinet because he preferred his study for actual drinking and the library for the appearance of taste. I poured two fingers into one of the crystal glasses on the shelf and stood at the window, watching the garden lights blur in the hot August dark. I had never really drunk before. A sip at Christmas once. A little champagne at a wedding when nobody was looking. This was different. It warmed me. It did not make anything better. It made the edges a little less sharp. I poured one more. I was warm, not drunk. That mattered later. It matters now. As the evening wore on, guests congratulated Lizzie. Toasts were made. Pride came off my parents in waves, as if her success belonged to them. I had stood near the edge of the room and watched, holding a glass I hadn’t touched, doing the same old math. How to take up the least space. How to need the least. How to leave without anyone noticing. That was when I caught my father’s eye. He stood across the room, deep in conversation with one of his colleagues, but for a moment his gaze drifted and found mine. There was something in it. Not warmth exactly. Something older. Heavier. For one strange second, it looked almost like apology. He did that sometimes when no one else was watching. Looked at me like he owed me something and had no idea how to pay it. Then my mother’s hand appeared at his elbow. His face closed immediately. He turned back to his colleague. The moment shut itself away, the way it always did. I told myself it meant nothing. I had been telling myself that my whole life. I slipped away not long after. I was halfway through my second glass when I heard footsteps in the doorway. Jacob stood there, jacket slightly crooked, tie loose, and a look on his face I had never seen before. He always held himself well. Men like Jacob were trained early to treat composure like part of the suit. Right now he looked like someone had knocked the composure clean off him. “You’re hiding too,” I said. He let out a sound that was almost a laugh. “Not hiding,” Jacob said. “Regrouping.” “What’s the difference?” “Less shame, supposedly.” He came into the room and sat in the armchair across from me, elbows on his knees, eyes on the floor. I looked at him. Dark suit. Loosened tie. Hair less perfect than it had been two hours ago. Unfairly, stupidly, still the most attractive man I had ever seen in person. I kept that to myself. “Do you want some?” I asked, nodding toward the whiskey. Jacob looked at the bottle, then at me.