“You know, Gillian… when I found out the truth about Lorna, and Mom, and everything… I can’t explain it. It felt like I was one of those wasps you see at the end of summer, you know? The ones that look mostly dead but then, if you poke them, it’s like they suddenly realize they’re still alive, still angry, they’ve still got a sting in them.”

She looks at me.

“I think I was just so tired, you know, from things with Dennis and then the anxiety I’d been getting… and not having Dad around. I felt like I was disappearing, and then this just—it shocked me back into myself, I guess.

I don’t really mean in a good way. But it did something.”

Makes sense, I think. Maybe if I’m honest I’ve even felt a little of the same thing myself. That feeling of growing fainter, less colorful, as though some little piece of you is in danger of fading away.

“And then…” She shrugs. “I wasn’t expecting Lorna to feel like my mother, Gillian. But I think… I think I was expecting more, somehow.” She stops. “It’s not her. It’s not Lorna’s fault, I mean. I like her. I even feel connected to her, in some ways. But I don’t… I don’t feel better. I don’t feel better about anything the way I thought I would.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She sighs, tilts her head back against the wall again.

“What do you think it would have been like, Gillian—if Mom and Dad had told us the truth? If we’d grown up just knowing?”

I look away. I’ve been wondering that too: what other shape our family might have grown into if there hadn’t been this secret in our home, pushing Mom and Dad to act in the ways they did. If Mom hadn’t been so anxious. If Dad hadn’t felt guilty. If he hadn’t always been Abigail’s protector and I hadn’t become Mom’s ally.

I wonder what it would have meant to me growing up, knowing that my older sister was adopted. Would I have used it to torture her when she and I got into childish arguments? Would I have bragged about it in school, thinking it made our family exotic?

Who knows.

I look at my sister across the stairwell.

“Why did you leave like that?” I say. “After high school. You didn’t even say goodbye.”

She shrugs.