Page 145 of These Summer Storms

“You sent me away,” Greta said, all her focus on Elisabeth, who suddenly couldn’t seem to meet her eldest daughter’s gaze. “You told me I’d shamed the family. You took away my friends, my family, my future. To protect the scandal, you said. To protectStorm. And the whole time—Emily washere.In this house.”

Oh no.

“Greta,” Elisabeth said with a little laugh, bordering on manic, as though she’d finally, finally begun to see what she had wrought. “We had to make sure no one found out—it would have ruined all the plans you had for your life.”

“It was an abortion, Mom. Plenty of people make that choice. Women make that choice every day, and live their lives, no ruin in sight.”

“Not in our circle!” Elisabeth said. “In our circle, you call a doctor. You handle it quietly. You walked into apublic clinicin Union Square and did it without telling us! Your father wasfurious. What if someone hadseen?”

“Myfather?” Greta shot back.

“Yes.”

“Not you? You weren’t consumed by fear that I might have made my own decision and decided I liked the taste of being in control of myself? Of living outside of your shadow? Of having a future of my own making?”

Elisabeth’s gaze narrowed. “It wasn’tyourfuture, Greta. It was noneof your futures. You’reStorms. Your future was in this family. We couldn’t risk another mistake.”

“I didn’t make a mistake!”

“You got yourself knocked up by some…” She waved a hand. “I don’t even know.”

Sam and Alice shared another look.Knocked upwas not a term anyone had ever dreamed Elisabeth Storm would use.

“Well, Mom. Turns out you did, too,” Greta shot back. “And no one sent you away for a year to sit with your choice in a foreign country, alone, until you begged to come home and swore you’d never make anothermistakeagain.”

Alice’s mind raced. When Greta was nineteen, she’d taken a gap year and gone to Switzerland. The story had always been that she’d worked in Geneva and bummed around Europe on the weekends, too busy to come home. The rest of them were in school—Sam was a senior in high school and as self-absorbed as millionaire homecoming kings could get, Alice had been in middle school and as self-absorbed as twelve-year-olds could get, and Emily…she’d been seven years old and attached to Elisabeth. A little duckling.

Greta had returned serious and chic: thin as a rail, speaking perfect French, ready for a degree in existentialist philosophy at Brown and a lifetime as Elisabeth’s shadow. She’d been almost unrecognizable to Alice, who, if she’d given it any thought (she was twelve, she hadn’t), would have chalked it up to the fact that she hadn’t seen her older sister for a year.

“You convinced me that I’d never have another chance of happiness after that. That I’d never have love. That I’d never have a family, unless I did as I was told. Unless I was a good soldier in your little army.” Greta shook her head. “All to keep me here. With you. Like your prize.”

Alice’s heart ached along with her sister’s, and she raised a hand to her chest, as though she could make it stop. Across the room, shock was written all over Sam’s face, and he opened his mouth to say something. Recognizing the horrible idea, Alice shook her head once. Firmly.Not now.

Her brother really was showing growth, as he listened and kept his mouth shut.

The same could not be said of Elisabeth, who seemed to have finally realized that she was in deep. Once Greta was lost—Rome had fallen. She scrambled. “Your father—”

“Stop,”Greta said. “You don’t want us to rewrite history? You don’t get to, either. And you might not have been the one to send me away, but you were absolutely the one to keep me here.”

Before Elisabeth could reply, Greta added, “You owe Emily an apology. And honestly, if she never forgives you, I wouldn’t blame her.”

“He never said a word about it, until he died,” Elisabeth said. “Saved it up to punish me with it, just like he punished me with it every time she ran to him. The moment she was born, she was his favorite.” Elisabeth was searching for a way to hurt them. To bring them down into her muck. “And she wasn’t even his.”

It was a deeply shitty and deeply false thing to say. “How exactly did he punish you by loving her, Mom?” Alice couldn’t help the retort.

“Your father didn’tlove,Alice,” Elisabeth said. “You know that better than anyone.”

The words should have hurt, but they didn’t, lacking the power they would have had a day earlier. An hour earlier.

“Neither did you, Mom.” Greta hung her head and stared at her hands, fingers knotted together tightly, like if she released them she might fly away. “All those years I hid the truth, thinking you were right. Thinking no one could ever know. Being so sure that my choice, the right choice, would ruin me. I was too ashamed to tell anyone, even the one person…”

Greta trailed off, unable to speak the end of the sentence.

…who loved me unconditionally.

Alice’s throat tightened, tears springing again as she stared at her older sister, shattered as much as their younger one, no sound in the room but the rain pounding against the windows, a slow, devastating cyclone, depositing the driftwood and secrets it found, not at a distance, but right here. Inside.

“It was for your own good,” Elisabeth said.

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