My feet stopped.
"Kate. You came." Rebecca's eyes lit up. She stood awkwardly, then sat only after I did.
I did not touch the food.
"Where is he?"
She knew exactly who I meant.
Thomas. Our father.
If you asked me which of them I hated more, it would always be Thomas. My mother had loved both of us evenly when we were small, then tilted, openly, toward me. I had never understood why. I could at least understand the coldness that grew in Rebecca after our mother got sick.
But Thomas. Before our mother fell ill, he was a good father. A good husband. Then she got sick, and the man I knew vanished. In his place was someone cold, distant, unwilling to lift a finger for either of us. Sometimes I wondered if the man who raised me had been a stranger the entire time. If a man could pretend t
