“So you just… stayed my best friend. For twenty-eight more years. Knowing.”
“I stayed your sister,” Paige said. “You just didn’t know it.”
I couldn’t say anything after that. Neither could she. We stayed on the phone, not talking, until the birds started outside.
I put my head down on Russell’s desk and cried until the sky outside the window went from black to gray.
He hadn’t been sneaking off to see another woman.
He’d been sitting across from my sister in a diner every Thursday, trying to convince her to tell me the truth.
And I had told every person I loved that she was a snake.
CHAPTER 5: SUNDAY AT MOM’S
My mother’s seventy-fifth birthday party was that Sunday. It had been on the calendar for months. Twenty-five people. Cousins, neighbors, the women from her quilting group. Pot roast and lemon cake in the backyard of the house where I grew up.
