“Why didn’t you tell him anything?” I say. “When you found out about Lorna…when you contacted her…I can understand why you couldn’t tell Sam, Abigail. I can maybe understand why you didn’t tell Mom or me. But couldn’t you have told Dennis? Instead of just disappearing and letting him think the worst.”

“You don’t know Dennis,” my sister says then, her voice tight. “He thinks the worst no matter what. He thinks whatever I do is the worst.” She doesn’t look up.

“Things had gotten so bad between us, Gillian. I just had this feeling that if I told him about…about Lorna, about what I’d found, that he’d use it against me somehow. Not at first, maybe, but later. This ‘apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ stuff.” She glances up. “Dennis’s family has always been big on pedigree. And he’s…I didn’t want to give him that kind of ammunition, Gillian. The truth is I haven’t been doing that well, this past year.” She hesitates.

“I was getting this anxiety—bad anxiety. Some days I didn’t even feel good enough to pick Sam up from school. I’d ask one of the other neighborhood parents if they could do it, but one time we had a miscommunication and no one was there to get him. Dennis was furious. You have one job to do, that’s what he says. My one job is to make sure our kid has the perfect mother—the kind of domestic, constantly accommodating mother Dennis grew up with.” Abigail shakes her head. “I felt like he was already building this case against me in his head, you know? ‘Fragile mental health,’ ‘unfit mother,’ you know the kind of thing. I didn’t want to give him more fuel for all that.” She looks away again, folds her arms across her stomach.

“Abigail…” I say. “I’m sorry.”

I can see on Mom’s face that she’s as taken aback as I am if not more. The idea that Abigail was dealing with anxiety like this; the fact that their marriage had eroded so far.