I sit at one end of the breakfast table, Kai at the other, the length of polished mahogany between us holding all the words we refuse to speak.
Heinrich's newspaper creates a wall of newsprint and rustling pages. Diane's brittle cheerfulness fills the gaps with small talk that bounces off the tension without penetrating it.
Kai does not look at me. I do not look at him. We are two people performing ignorance of each other's existence with the dedication of actors who have rehearsed this scene too many times.
My fork moves eggs around my plate without bringing any to my mouth. I think of last night—his empty bed, the cold sheets, the books. I never delivered my apology.
"Skye, darling," Diane says, breaking the tension with manufactured lightness that scrapes my already raw nerves, "I won't be able to drive you to campus today. I have a meeting with the garden club."
"I can—" I start, already calculating bus routes, already preparing to extract myself from this suffocating house.
"Kai is going that direction." Heinrich folds his paper with precise creases, each fold deliberate and measured. "He can drive you."
My spine stiffens. Across the table, Kai's fork pauses halfway to his mouth. We exchange a glance—hostile, wary, electric—and look away simultaneously.
"I'd prefer—"
"You'll take the ride," Heinrich interrupts, not unkindly. "In fact, I'll arrange for your own car this week. You shouldn't be dependent on others for basic mobility."
My face heats with humiliation—the specific shame of being discussed like a problem to be solved, an expense to be managed, a stray collected out of obligation rather than affection.
I think of my father. Alistair Fraser, who taught me to change my own oil in a parking lot behind our apartment building. Who believed dependence was weakness. Who never would have accepted a handout dressed as kindness from a man he barely knew.
"Thank you," I say, and my voice comes out too sharp, too bitter. "How generous. Another item on your ledger of obligations fulfilled."
"Skye." Diane's warning is soft, a hiss disguised as concern.
"What? I'm grateful." I push my chair back, the wooden legs scraping against the floor with a sound that matches the discord in my chest. "I'm so grateful to be reminded that I have nothing of my own here. No history, no—"
I cannot finish the sentence. Cannot name everything I lack without my voice breaking, without revealing the hollow space where my pride used to live.
"That's enough." Diane's tone hardens. "You're spoiling the morning for everyone with this performance."
"Then I'll stop performing." I stand, my plate abandoned, and feel Kai's eyes on me with an intensity that makes me want to scream or cry or both. "I'll wait in the car. Since I'm apparently unable to transport myself."
I turn toward the door, my heels clicking against the hardwood with more force than necessary.
Diane's hand closes around my arm before I reach the hallway, her fingers digging in with surprising strength. The grip stops me short.
"A moment, daughter." Her voice has dropped to an intimate register I recognize immediately—the tone she uses for words designed to hurt.
"Let go."
"You'll want to hear this." Her smile is fixed, terrible, her eyes bright with an emotion I cannot name. "Consider it punishment for your behavior at the table. Consider it context for all that righteous grief you carry for your father."
I try to pull away, but her grip tightens, anchoring me in the hallway just beyond the breakfast room's sightlines.
"Your father," Diane says, the words deliberate as knife-thrusts. "Your perfect, patient, bicycle-teaching father. He was not what you remember."
"I don't—"
"He hit me, Skye. Repeatedly."
The words don't land at first. They bounce off some protective barrier in my mind, rejected before they can take root.
"That's not true." My voice sounds distant, belonging to someone else. "Dad never—he wasn't—"
"From the first year of our marriage until the month he died." Her voice is flat now, stripped of performance, reduced to fact. "He broke my ribs when I was pregnant with you."
She's lying. She has to be lying. This is Diane being Diane—theatrical, manipulative, willing to say anything to win an argument.
"I wore long sleeves through summer to hide the bruises," she continues. "I learned to love him eventually—Stockholm syndrome, the therapists call it, though I prefer to think I was simply adaptable."
The hallway tilts. The floor becomes uncertain beneath my feet.
"But I'm glad he's dead," she says, her smile fixed and horrible. "Every day, I wake up and I'm glad."
"You're lying." My voice comes out strangled, desperate. "You're trying to hurt me because you're angry, because I ruined your breakfast, because—"
But she did wear long sleeves in summer.
"Am I lying?" Diane releases my arm, but the hold shifts to something worse—eye contact, undeniable. "The scar beneath your left collarbone. The one you've never explained. You were three. He was angry about—" She pauses, as if searching for the detail. "Some trivial thing. They always are. And you were in the way."
My hand moves without conscious thought, fingers pressing against the raised skin beneath my collarbone. The scar I have carried my entire life without a story to explain it.
"I got between you," Diane says, "but not fast enough. The coffee table edge caught you as you fell."
"I don't—" My throat closes around the words. "I would remember."
"You didn't. You were hysterical, then you slept, then you woke smiling and called him 'Daddy' and he wept with relief." Diane steps back, smoothing her dress with hands that shake only slightly. "So when I say I'm glad he's dead, I mean it with my whole heart. And when I say you're more like him than you know—that temper, that destruction—I mean that too."
The marble statue of my father cracks in my chest. The image I have carried since childhood—patient hands on bicycle seats, warm laughter over morning coffee, the man who taught me that books are conversations with people you'll never meet—fractures along fault lines I never knew existed.
"Now go to the car." Diane's voice has returned to its measured register, the performance resuming as if she has not just detonated my understanding of everything I thought I knew. "Kai is waiting."
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