Page 79 of Devil's Thirst

“It’s not that, either. Well, that’s part of it, but I’ve understood. I promise.”

The silence presses in on my eardrums, pressure building all around me. “Then what’s got you so upset?”

She inhales deeply, then blows the breath past her nose as though preparing herself.

For what? What the fuck is going on here?

“You saw my email that I put all your stuff in storage?”

“Yeah, I actually stopped by not long after I came back.”

She nods almost to herself. “I considered having an estate agent get rid of everything when we sold the house. It wasn’t long after you’d left for Sicily, and you said you didn’t want any of it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to wade through all the memories. But I eventually decided I didn’t want to risk losing something of Mom’s that I would have wanted to keep. It tookme a couple of months. I went through her bedroom and closet, then boxed up your room. At the last minute, I decided to look in Dad’s office in case there was anything of Mom’s in there.” Noemi stares at the mug in her hands, her chin starting to quiver. “I found a stash of old letters with pictures. They were from Umberto’s mother, giving Dad updates about him from the time he was little.” The sympathy and remorse in her eyes when she lifts them to mine clamps a fist around my throat.

Umberto was Dad’s lieutenant, essentially. His right hand. He was close to Noemi’s age, brought on to work for Dad when he was maybe sixteen and became a semi-permanent fixture in our home. Loyal to Dad until the very end.

“Why would his mother send Dad updates about him?” Had DadboughtUmberto in some kind of strange trafficking arrangement to breed loyal soldiers? It’s far-fetched, but my father was capable of anything.

Noemi is fighting back sobs, unable to meet my eyes any longer. “I didn’t want to tell you over the phone. I kept thinking surely you’d come back, but then years passed. I considered not saying anything at all, but … but I couldn’t bear carrying that. You know I’m not the secretive type.”

“Bear what, Em? What are you trying to tell me?” My tone is harsher than it should be, and I hear the scrape of a kitchen chair as Conner rises to his feet.

“Umberto was our half brother,” she whispers, her eyes pleading with me to understand. To forgive.

I hear her words, but they don’t make any sense in my head.

“He couldn’t have been. We’d have known.”

I would have known if I killed my own brother.

Her head shakes slowly side to side. “I’m not sure he even knew. We looked into it, though, and it’s true. Umberto was born six months before me. I wanted to know who this woman was that Dad had been with. When we found her, she was practicallydestitute. Dad had been helping her get by, but not with much, and without him, she was facing eviction. She’s kind. I could see why he’d been with her. She wasn’t all that different from Mom.”

I want to slap my hand across my sister’s mouth to keep her quiet. To stop her words from ripping apart my world as thoroughly as if the rain outside was made of pure acid. But I don’t. I can’t. My entire body is frozen solid with shock while Noemi continues.

“She’s a victim of his as much as the rest of us. I decided I wanted to help her, which is why I felt like you needed to know the truth. I didn’t want you to find out some other way and hate me for hiding it from you.” She pauses, her voice lowering. “I’m so sorry, Sante. I hate to make things worse. You’ve been so hard on yourself about everything that happened, but you were just a kid.”

“I was sixteen when he killed her,” I say tonelessly. “That’s old enough to read the writing on the wall.”

“I didn’t know either. They both hid the destructive nature of the relationship better than I could have imagined.”

“You caught on and tried to stop him.”

“Only because Mom told me right before she died.”

I rocket to my feet, my rage boiling over. “He did the same fucking thing to you as he’d done to her right in front of myfuckingface, and Istilldidn’t see it.” The manipulation. The nuanced threats sprinkled into everyday conversation. There were clues, but I simply ignored them.

Conner storms over, but Noemi tries to call him off with a swipe of her hand.

“We don’t see what we don’t want to see. That’snatural. Umberto practically lived with us, and I never noticed how much he looked like Dad until they were both gone. That’s how our minds protect us.”

I recall the pride in my father’s voice when he spoke about Umberto. I think back to when Umberto first started coming by the house and how upset Mom was. I told myself she didn’t want work brought home. I convinced myself the reason Dad brought Umberto into the fold rather than me was because I was too young. I told myself everything but the truth.

“It’s a tempting excuse, but it doesn’t change the fact that I killed our brother.”

“No,” Conner interjects. “But I would have if you hadn’t. Maybe you forget that I’m the one who killed your father. Your relation to them doesn’t change the fact that they were both rotten.”

He’s right, but it doesn’t nullify the geyser of molten anger rising inside me.

I’m so fucking sick of living with this guilt. My innate weaknesses caused me to lose so much when none of it was necessary. If I’d been less naive. If I’d been strong enough to see the world for what it is.

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