“Okay.” Joey put a hand on the door handle, but something stopped her from turning it. “Maybe it’s not fair,” she finally whispered. “To put my happiness on you.”

“Joey, I—”

Joey put up her hand. She was utterly spent. “Look, you asked me the question.”

“You’re right. I did.”

“Well, you know what they say?” Joey opened the door to a gust of heat through G’s igloo.

“No. What?”

“They say that the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. And I think you can tell that I’m not indifferent at all.”

Chapter Forty-Three

Sarah

Florida
2019

The foyer was dim. Outside, sunlight glittered atop the Technicolor lawn; Sarah swept the curtains across to shroud the windows. Now she watched the shadows play together on the wall—even the shadows were too happy.

As Sarah padded into the kitchen, she caught her reflection in the mirror by the picture of Sam as a boy. Her white hair shot from her head in fifty directions. She looked like Albert Einstein. She registered it and kept moving. Cherries. She would finish the cherries. And have a glass of water.

The last person she expected to see sitting at her breakfast table was her daughter. Bea looked up, and Sarah’s body didn’t react in its usual way—reaching for Bea, always reaching. She almost didn’t recognize her daughter. Maybe it was Bea’s face devoid of its typical irritation or opinion. Or maybe it was that it had no makeup enhancing it.

Her daughter looked older; that’s what Sarah really thought. Maybe the way a person looked changed when you started to resent them.

“I didn’t invite you to come.” Sarah reached for a glass and filled it from the fridge dispenser.

Bea opened her mouth and then closed it. So unlike her to grasp for words. Usually they streamed out like a fire hydrant unleashed on a street corner, dousing innocent passersby.

Sarah drank her water and thought what a foreign thing it was to resent the person whom she loved the most, whom she’d given life, whom for years and years she’d longed for. Previously, Sarah had only experienced negative emotions toward the amorphous Nazis. Toward the boy soldier who’d imprisoned her family. Toward Milos. Toward herself. Toward Sam, even. Oh, Sam. But to feel resentful toward Bea? Well, until today that would have seemed inconceivable.

And yet.

“So Joey filled you in?” Sarah’s feet were cold on the tile, but there was something very alive about the cold, and something very alive about the anger churning in her. “You know that I know. That you kept Milos from me. That he wanted to find me and you…you…”

“I’m sorry, but I thought you kept Rand from me!” A horrible silence thundered between them.