My Delicate Sister-In-Law Turned Feral When They Hurt Me

The first time I realized my sister-in-law might actually be made of spun glass was the day she moved in. Derek carried every box. Every single one. She stood in the doorway of our house on Alder Lane with her hands clasped like she was afraid of breaking something, and when he set down the last load he was sweating through his shirt while she pressed a glass of water into his hands and said, "You should hydrate, baby." I was seventeen then, sprawled on the stairs, watching. I remember thinking, this woman is going to fold like wet paper the first time anything real happens. Her name is Vivienne. She married my brother two years ago, and in all that time I never saw her lift anything heavier than a teacup. Derek opened her water bottles. Derek checked the temperature of her soup with his pinky before he let her eat it. If the wind picked up past ten miles per hour she'd pull her coat tighter and he'd wrap an arm around her like she was a porcelain doll in a hurricane. My friends thought it was sweet. I thought it was ridiculous. "She's not actually helpless," my best friend Marisol told me once, after Vivienne asked Derek to kill a spider that was three feet away from her. "Nobody's actually that helpless." "She is," I said. "She's a glass ornament. Derek married a glass ornament." But here's the thing about glass ornaments. They shatter when you drop them. They sparkle when the light hits them. And sometimes, if you hold them up just right, you catch a reflection of something you weren't expecting. I didn't know that yet. I found out at a birthday party, of all places. Ellis Montgomery's birthday party. Ellis was the kind of girl who had everything handed to her and still found ways to complain, and she lived in a house off the coast highway that had an actual name, like a horse farm. Her parents had a pool shaped like a kidney bean, a catering company, and a bouncer at the door even though we were all seventeen. Her family was new money, the loud kind, the kind that bought their way into circles that didn't want them. The Ashfords, the family my brother's wife came from, had been rich so long they didn't talk about it. There's a difference, and Ellis felt it every single day. I didn't want to go. But Marisol promised it would be fun, and I was seventeen, and I hadn't learned yet that some invitations are traps wearing ribbon. Let me back up. My name is Paige Halloran. I live with my older brother Derek and his wife Vivienne in a house that our parents left us. Mom and Dad died four years ago in a car accident on the coast road, and Derek came home from his first year of college to take care of me. He met Vivienne six months later, at a coffee shop where she was reading a novel and he spilled his Americano on her boots and apologized for twenty minutes straight. He fell for her fast. The whole town did, or the whole town that noticed her, which wasn't many people. She's quiet. She doesn't post on social media. She doesn't go to farmers markets or school events or the kind of town gatherings where people introduce themselves. She stays home, she reads, she takes walks along the cliffs when the weather's mild, and she smiles at Derek like he hung the moon. People assumed she was fragile. I assumed it too. At Ellis Montgomery's party, I found out exactly how wrong an assumption can be. I remember the light. The pool lights were on, that underwater blue, and the caterers were passing around tiny plates of things nobody eats, and Ellis's older brother Cole was standing by the keg with his friends. Cole had been expelled from two schools and had spent the summer making his i********: all about his new truck and his new pistol. I kept to myself, mostly. I stood near the food table and watched Marisol dance with some guy from her chemistry class, and I thought about how I'd rather be home with a book. I didn't know that Cole had been talking about my family. I didn't know that his friends had been egging him on. But I found out around ten o'clock, when I walked past him and heard my name. "...Halloran's sister," he was saying. "The one whose parents died. You know her brother married that weird recluse from the Ashford family? The one everybody says is a little off?" I stopped walking. The music was loud. Everybody was dancing or drinking. Nobody heard us, and I should have kept moving. I should have walked out the door and called Derek and told him to come pick me up. But I was seventeen, and I was angry, and I hadn't learned yet the difference between a fight you can win and a fight that wins by eating you. "What did you say?" I asked. Cole turned around slow, like he'd been waiting for me. He had a smile on his face that I still see in my worst dreams. "Hey," he said, all warmth, all fake. "Paige, right? I was just saying, your brother's wife. Vivienne Ashford. Or Vivienne Halloran now." He pronounced it wrong, Ash-ford, like a county. "I hear she doesn't go out much. Must be nice, being married into a family where you don't have to work." "She doesn't owe you anything," I said. And it came out smaller than I wanted, and he heard that, and he smiled wider. Then one of his friends said something I didn't catch, and Cole laughed, and reached over, and picked up a paper cup of punch, and— I don't remember the throw. I remember the splash. I remember red running down my dress, and the smell of cheap fruit juice mixed with something sharp and artificial, and then I remember the hands. Two hands, one on each shoulder, shoving. The pool water was cold. It was so cold it took my breath away. I came up gasping, and my dress was stuck to me, and my hair was in my eyes, and Cole was standing at the edge of the pool laughing, and people had turned to stare, and nobody, nobody, was helping. I remember Marisol screaming. I remember somebody saying "oh my god". I remember crawling out of the pool shaking, and the walk to the front of the house, and sitting on the sidewalk with my arms around my knees while Marisol called Derek. The gate opened, and Derek's truck was there, and he got out and ran to me. And he held me, and asked me who, and stood up, and walked toward the front door of that house like a man going to war. That's the part I remember clearly. My brother, with his shoulders up and his hands shaking, walking into a party full of people who weren't his people, to fight for me. And I remember the sound, ten minutes later, of Vivienne's heels.