Chapter 6

January came, lean and gray. The holidays folded into weeks, the snow melting and refreezing, the mornings dark, the cold pressing against the windows like a hand.

The family fractured.

Not loudly, not publicly, but quietly, along the seams that had been cracking for years. My father called once, awkward and short, and I knew from his silence that he was staying out of it. Margaret's texts were careful, daily, checking in without pressure. Petra's were something else — long, rambling, accusatory spirals that I read once and then started reading less.

"You don't need to read those," Eli said quietly one evening, when I was sitting at the kitchen table with my phone face-up in front of me, the bubble of Petra's message glowing.

"I know," I said. "I'm trying to stop."

He came around the table and sat beside me. "Nora. She hit our daughter on Christmas Eve. She's spending January trying to convince you that you're the unreasonable one." He paused. "I did research. That's what they call her behavior in the books. 'The scapegoat.' 'The golden child.'"

"I don't need a book to tell me my sister's behavior," I said, and the words came out sharper than I meant. "Sorry. I didn't mean—"

"I know you didn't." He put his hand over mine, stilling my fingers. "I read two books anyway. I wanted to know how to help you."

"Help me what?"

"See it clearly," he said. "See her clearly. Because you've spent thirty-four years being told that the way she makes you feel is your problem, and I want you to know that it isn't."

I looked at him — at my husband, who had been home for a month now, who had spent more time with June in these weeks than the entire first nine months of her life, and who had become, quietly and steadily, the axis of our small new family.

"There's a pattern," he said. "Petra makes a comment. You absorb it. You feel guilty for absorbing it. The room moves on. And you're left carrying the feeling of being wrong, even though you did nothing wrong."

I was quiet.

"That's not something a book taught me," he said. "That's something I watched happen at every dinner I've had with your family."

I looked down at my phone. Petra's message was still glowing: "I'm not doing well, Nora. I'm not sleeping. Mom won't even talk to me. All because you decided to blow up Christmas over a misunderstanding."

"A misunderstanding," I said.

"Don't reply," Eli said.

"I'm not."

"You're reading it."

"I'm working on it."

He squeezed my hand and let go, rising to check on June, who was making small noises in the nursery. I sat at the table, the phone in my palm, feeling the familiar pull — the old instinct to fix, to smooth, to make peace by making myself smaller.

Then I thought about the form in Eli's jacket. His signature. The word REFUSED.