Somewhere inside, a voice tells me that one of these days I will have to release Dad from his obligation he has in death to be perfect. That he and I will both be a little freer once I do. And I guess Abigail’s going to have to do the same thing.

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” Abigail says to Mom. I hear the guilt in her voice too, and a sulky, wounded note. “But it was the same for us, you know.” She glances over. “For Gillian and me. You and Dad, you split us down the middle.”

Mom winces.

“I… I understand why you would say that—”

“It’s pretty true, Mom,” I say quietly. I don’t want to rub salt in the wound. But it seems like this is our day for honest talk.

Abigail nods.

“Gillian was yours; I was Dad’s.”

I feel the old fault-lines shudder as my sister speaks. There’s plenty I would have changed, too, about our childhood, but I’ve never wanted to hold it against my parents. Not because I’m a kinder person than my sister, but because it feels too uncomfortable for me to criticize. If anyone asks, I say my childhood was happy.

And it was—some days.

Mom looks at her lap. “It’s a terrible thing to admit, Abigail, but sometimes I think…I think maybe I was jealous. When you were very little.”

Abigail looks at her, disbelieving.

“Of me?”

Mom frowns. “Not of you. Of your father. Or maybe of both of you. He had such a bond with you right from the start. He’d always had such a soft spot for Lorna, you know; he’d treated her more like a daughter than a sister. All of that devotion, all of that instinct to protect, he brought it straight over to you, but times a hundred. You were so small, but so strong. The grip your tiny fingers had. Lungs of steel.” She shakes her head. “You responded to him so differently than you did to me. Right from the start. He was the one that could always get you to sleep. Who could get you to calm down when you cried.”

“Mom. Are you serious?” Abigail stares at her. “I was a baby. Babies don’t pick favorites. I probably just liked the way his chest rumbled or something.”

Mom blinks at that. I can see it’s all but impossible for her to reconfigure those memories: to view it the way Abigail’s suggesting.

She sighs.