“That courtesy was later tolerated by Audrey out of deference to her father, but those are not the same as legal rights,” Lydia added. Victoria’s head turned sharply toward me with a look of naked fury.
“You knew about this the entire time?” Victoria asked through gritted teeth. The question was so ridiculous that it almost made me want to laugh out loud.
“Yes, Victoria, I knew,” I replied. “Then why didn’t you ever say anything to us?” she demanded.
I thought about how my mother had asked me not to turn the house into a weapon. I thought about how I was twenty three and drowning in grief after she died, while my father looked smaller and weaker without her.
For years I told myself that love and restraint were the same thing, believing there might be a version of family worth salvaging. “Because I was trying very hard not to become someone like you,” I said as the silence followed my words.
The sound of the rope clinking against the old aluminum flagpole was the only thing I could hear. Cassandra let out an incredulous sound and shook her head behind her sunglasses.
“Oh my God, you are being so dramatic right now,” Cassandra said. I turned to her and remembered the message she had sent me the night before.
“Last night you texted me that I was never really a part of this family,” I reminded her. She folded her arms over her chest and stood her ground.
“You weren’t because you chose to leave and stay away,” she argued. “I moved to Philadelphia for my career, and that is not the same thing as joining a witness protection program,” I replied.
“You stopped showing up to the things that mattered,” she snapped. “I stopped showing up to dinners where your mother turned every conversation about my actual mother into a correction exercise,” I said.
Cassandra’s jaw hardened as she looked at me. “Mom has done everything for this family, and you know it,” she said.
The words hit me with a strange force because they were so old and familiar. Cassandra had been repeating some version of them since she was sixteen when Victoria first started using the phrase “after all I’ve done.”
It was always framed as generosity or sacrifice, but the subtext was always about possession. The older officer handed the papers back to Lydia and looked at Victoria.