“I don’t know. Mom always seemed to think I was just one step from disaster, you know? Maybe I just felt it was time to call her bluff. Find out if I really was a mess, or if I was going to be able to hold it all together and make a life for myself.” She looks at me. “And you know, after all, I was good at being an adult, Gillian. I figured things out. I never had to ask them for money once I left home, not once. I didn’t have to come back with my tail between my legs. Sometimes I think Mom wishes I had. That she’s mad that I proved her wrong, by not being a disaster.”

I look at her.

“I don’t think she wishes that, Abigail. I don’t think so at all.”

My sister looks away, chin jutting out.

“Does it…change anything for you, about Dad?” I say finally. “Finding out all this.”

She sighs.

“I just wish I’d gotten to tell him that it was okay, Gillian. That he was really my dad, that he’d always be my dad.”

I swallow.

“I think he knew,” I say.

The fact that Abigail was Dad’s favorite…I guess it feels like something I always knew, and that always hurt a little. But even that feels different now. It hurts in a different way, if I’m honest, and I feel ashamed of myself for that—as though Abigail has less right to be his favorite now, just because she wasn’t his biological child. It seems wrong that I should be jealous over something like that, given what she’s going through.

Abigail slides her eyes towards me.

“I think it’s different,” she says, thinking aloud. “Because I never doubted how Dad felt about me. Never. But Mom…I was never quite so sure. And now that I know the truth, it’s like I see our whole relationship in double vision.” She closes her eyes again. “It doesn’t seem like over a year since Dad died, does it?”

“No.”

I picture my father leaving Westchester that morning: the early fall weather, Abigail waving from the doorway.

“I just can’t believe that Sam’s been dealing with…with all this stuff, since then,” Abigail says. “I feel like such a terrible parent.”

I look at her tired face.

“It probably happened very slowly,” I say. “And besides, he was trying to hide it. I think it probably needed someone with more distance to see it,” I add, remembering Dinah, and Josie.

Abigail sighs.