I read it standing in my office, the western sky bruised purple beyond the glass. The message looked innocent. Seven words. No accusation sharp enough to show in court. But I felt my stomach tighten the way it had when I was seventeen and heard her call my full name from downstairs.
Margaret Hale had a way of making invitations feel like summonses.
I considered ignoring it. Then I imagined what would follow: two more texts, a voicemail, my father calling, Bethany posting something vague about family abandonment, maybe an aunt from Naperville asking if I was “doing okay” because my mother was “worried sick.”
So I replied.
Sunday works. Where?
She chose a restaurant in Oak Brook, polished and expensive enough to suggest celebration, quiet enough to stage an ambush. That was my first warning.
The second warning was that Bethany came.
I arrived at exactly one o’clock and found all three of them already seated at a corner table near a window. My father stood halfway when he saw me, then sat again as if remembering we were not that formal a family. My mother rose with both arms extended, perfume preceding her like a weather system.
“Christina, darling,” she said, kissing the air beside my cheek. “We hardly see you.”
“I’ve been busy,” I said, sliding into the chair across from Bethany.
Bethany did not get up. She glanced at me over her phone, then returned to scrolling. Her hair was freshly highlighted, her nails a glossy pale pink, her sweater soft and cream-colored with a designer logo small enough to be expensive. She was twenty-nine, though in moments like that she could still look sixteen: bored, pretty, waiting to be served.
“You always say work is busy,” my father said.
“That’s because work is busy.”
He made a sound that might have been amusement. Richard Hale had retired from a middle management position at a logistics company three years earlier and had spent retirement developing the tone of a man who believed he had run General Motors. He wore a navy blazer and checked his watch twice before the server arrived, though we had nowhere to be.
We ordered drinks. My mother asked about the product launch with a face arranged into interest, but when I answered in even mild detail, her eyes drifted toward Bethany.
“Your sister has been doing something exciting too,” she said.
Bethany looked up.
“Oh?”