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English Tea, One Cricket and Two Swans
Iris forced herself to stand straight like the nuns had taught her while holding a pencil between her shoulder blades, point-side in. She desperately wanted to lie down under her counter in a fetal position.
She couldn’t look at her grieving mother without feeling guilt, which was even worse than the abhorrent truth that her brother was never, ever, ever coming home. Thank God there were people around to comfort her mother. The colonel. Her mother’s tennis cronies. She wanted none of it. She didn’t deserve comfort. Not even from her surrogate mothers. Mostly because they just told her what she knew to be false truths. Of course it was she, Iris Mary Fuller, who was to blame.
The fact that she mourned Pietro as much as she mourned her brother—Go
