Read The Sister Season for Free Online Page B

time Maya stopped abruptly, her hand leaving Elise’s. Her cheeks were pink, whether with fury or cold Elise couldn’t be sure. “Mom, I will never forgive her. You don’t sleep with your sister’s husband and just . . . expect forgiveness.” She raised a manicured nail, pointed it at the house as if she were pointing to her sister. “Now, I will make nice for the next few days until we get Dad buried, but then she’s back to not even existing in my world. Please don’t ask me to accept her. Please. Queenie understands and you need to, too. Claire is not my sister. She lost that right eight years ago. She will never get it back.”
    “Maya, it’s Christmas,” Elise said, standing there, clutching the empty bucket in front of her.
    “I know. I’m sorry. But it’s not like we’ve ever had a happy little family Christmas anyway,” Maya answered. “I need to check on the kids.” She turned on her heel and strutted off toward the house in those ridiculous boots, both arms crossed over her chest, her cocoa-colored hair fluttering beautifully against her jacket. Such perfection. Such torment. Elise could not see how you could separate the two when it came to that woman.
    Elise considered calling after her, but decided against it. What would she say? Just as Maya had no proof that Claire had been lying, neither did Elise have any that Claire had been telling the truth. Would she like to say she absolutely disbelieved that her younger daughter would do anything so terrible to her older sister? Yes, of course. But eight years ago was such a tumultuous time for Claire. Especially that particular day eight years ago. That day was the worst. The last day Claire ever spoke to her father or her sisters, as far as Elise knew.
    The day Maya found . . . Oh, poor Maya.
    Elise had thought she would never live through the weeping and the screaming and the threats and the beseeching to take a side, any side, but she found that if she simply stuck with her usual silent poise, eventually everything would calm down. She was hardly a pillar of strength at the time herself. She knew nothing about healthy marriages. And she felt like an utter failure over raising a daughter who would steal another daughter’s new husband. It just didn’t even seem possible. Surely there was a lesson she hadn’t imparted, a moral she hadn’t spoken.
    Maya and Claire were at war. They vowed never to speak to each other again—Maya out of betrayal and Claire out of disbelief that her sister would distrust her so—and poor Julia, not sure whose side to take, vowed silence as well, just to stay out of it. She had marriage problems of her own to deal with, and a six-year-old little boy caught between two fighting parents like a pasture fence trembling with the effort to stay dug in during a tornado.
    As far as Elise knew, that silence had mostly stuck. Claire packed a garbage bag full of clothes and slipped off to California. Bradley took a job in Chicago, where, cut off from family and everything familiar, Maya had no choice but to forgive him. And Julia lived her own separate hell up in Kansas City, leaving Elise to contend with Robert and all that achingly empty space in the house by herself.
    And now they were all back. They were under the same roof. They would be here for days.
    And most important . . . their silence would be forced to be broken.

Attempts—I
    T
he clock in his bedroom had the loudest tick he’d ever heard. Even if he’d wanted to sleep, there was no way he ever could. It was so quiet in the country—every little bump and noise and creak sounded like a bomb dropping.
    Not that he really wanted to sleep here at all. He didn’t even want to be here. He didn’t have any great Christmas plans or anything, but just sitting at home watching old reruns of that Charlie Brown Christmas show alone would be better than this. This house was hot. And crowded. And he didn’t know anyone, and they were all crammed around the