Page 70 of Break Your Fall

“Evidence,” Camille is saying. “Where’s your evidence?”

“It’s on her face,” I hear myself answer, a whisper as I study Jessa’s features once more. We have different eyes, different lips, but we have the exact same nose. The same soft bone structure. The same wavy, blonde hair that I can now see the strands of mixing in with the pink.

And she’s an artist. Like me.

“Clearly, you two need a minute,” Camille says now, dismissing herself with a squeeze to my arm.

“So it’s true,” Jessa concludes. “You never got his letters.”

“Letters?” I say dumbly, stopping myself before I addHis?Of course she means our father. He wrote me letters. How many? Where are they? I must ask these questions aloud, because next she’s answering them.

“He wrote a couple a month for a year, starting last summer. And I guess you not getting them has to do with your mom. You never wrote him back, or came to see us, and he blames her.” She sounds resentful about my lack of response, but our father was right to blame my mother; I don’t check our mail because I hardly get much, but when I do, she always lays it out for me.

And they could have come to see me themselves once they figured out I had no idea they were trying to reach me.

“That’s my mother,” I say through a whisper, my own tone resentful. “How old are you?” I ask next, that same sick feeling in my stomach.

“Eighteen,” she says with a small smile, seemingly happy that we’re the same age, while I’m just confused until she says, “I just had a birthday.”

This news hits my heart and I have to sit down. So she’s my age, younger by, what? How many months? “And he was in your life this whole time?” I can barely hear my own words, but they reach her.

“Yeah,” she answers with a sad stare, like she’s sorry that our father chose her over me. We both know that’s what happened. He chose my sister, and he let me go, all because of my mother. Dumped by association. Everything always comes back toher.

“I’m mad at him, too,” Jessa says, leaning toward me from across the small table. “He kept you to himself until recently, and I had to come see you.” Her eyes shine as they hold mine, like she likes what she’s found, the shine I feel in my own eyes coming from a darker, wet place. “I’ve always wanted a sister.”

I’ve always wanted a father.

I wait for the guilt in that being my first and only thought to hers, but it never comes. I’ve always wanted a father. A sister, or any sibling, was never a part of the family I imagined, because I never imagined my father having a family outside of me, wanting a kid who wasn’t me, giving me up not because of me, but because of my mother. He was supposed to be a bad guy who couldn’t want or care for anyone but himself.

This was supposed to be his fault, and his fault alone.

But that was the fantasy. The reality is that he’s a potentially good guy who knows how to care for a kid and nurture a marriage, stick around.

He wanted to be a father, just not to me.

I can’t look at her anymore. Because I don’t see a sister. I see a girl who should’ve been me. A girl who was raised right, who got the better side of the family, the whole side, all the pieces.

I’m the inferior child. The daughter my father couldn’t separate from her mother, the daughter he couldn’t see as his, too, as more of him.

“Let him make it up to you,” Jessa says now, urging and hopeful. “He’s great at fixing his mistakes when he can acknowledge them.” Her lips purse around a small laugh, and I think of how my lips make the same expression sometimes.

“It’s not that easy anymore.” I’m shaking my head with the words.

“Anymore?”

I’m on my feet now, then at the counter talking to Shelby, hopefully asking her to cover for me before I’m shoving myself through the door, my feet acting on an escape and a pursuit.

“This whole time?” I shout at my mother as I charge in on the family gathering she has assembled at the table in our kitchen. “My father has been aroundthis whole time?”

“Reyna.” An immediate warning for me to not embarrass her in front of her new life, spoil the show she’s been putting on for Aspen and Riley. Her teeth are clenched, her eyes wide, unprepared for this moment. A moment that was never supposed to come, a past she was sure she buried for good.

“We’re eating,” she says through a steady, pointed voice. “If you’d like to talk aboutsomething else, you can join us.”

“Where are the letters?” I know she’s kept them. My mother isn’t one to let go of her baggage, even when she’s not flaunting it. I bet she’s even read them. And she knows I’ll tear this house apart to find them if I have to.

She’s studying me, twirling her fork between her fingers as she decides the best way to react, the right thing to say for our audience. She’s caught, a fly in our tangled web.

“Are they in your room?”

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