Page 79 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Esther swiped her thumb over her mother’s image, clearing her of dust. In the photograph Isabel was supporting Esther on one knee like a tiny ventriloquist’s dummy, a posture Esther had always found oddly distant in comparison to the pictures of her and Cecily. Cecily always had her face squished up next to Esther’s, beaming. In this one the upper half of Isabel’s face had been cut off and only her mouth was visible, curled in a secret smile, a smile that was for herself and not for Esther or for the person behind the camera. Esther loved that smile. It made her mother look like a person, not a ghost.

She put down the photo and went to sit on the edge of her father’s bed, looking to his nightstand to see what he’d been reading. A couple detective novels and a copy ofCook’s Illustrated.She picked up the magazine and leafed through it until she found a recipe he’d circled and dated,as he’d always done. He’d wanted to cook a cassoulet. She wondered if he had.

His reading glasses were sitting on one of the novels, so familiar she had to turn away. Then she picked them up, feeling their spindly metal weight in her hands. She unfolded them and put them on, the room around her swelling and softening through the glass. The nose pads pinched, and she remembered the marks they’d left on Abe’s face, red divots standing out on the skin of his nose, and for some reason it was this detail that opened the gates she’d been keeping so tightly latched.

Someone knocked lightly on the half-opened door and somehow Esther wasn’t surprised to see Joanna standing there. She looked up at her sister, whose face was blurred by tears and by Abe’s lenses.

“Hi,” said Esther.

“Hi,” said Joanna.

For a moment, neither spoke. Then Esther said, working hard to steady her voice, “You haven’t even hugged me.”

Joanna took one step further into the room. “You didn’t hug me, either.”

That was true. Esther touched the bed next to her and Joanna hesitated before coming slowly over to sit, pulling her long braid over one shoulder and holding on to it like it was a lifeline. Esther moved closer, reached up to wrap her arms around her sister’s narrow shoulders, and for a moment it felt terrible: Joanna was stiff and unfamiliar, a stranger. Then, infinitesimally, she relaxed into the touch, her back curling slightly because Esther was shorter and had been since they were kids, and suddenly, like they’d both remembered how, they were hugging one another for real, Joanna’s head on Esther’s shoulder, Esther’s face pressed into her sister’s hair. They hugged the same way they had always hugged, Joanna tucked into Esther’s arms as if she were the smaller one, and Esther squeezing her so tightly she could feel Joanna’s bones creak under her grip. Her eyes had closed of their own accord but still tears were somehow pushing their way onto her cheeks.

When Joanna spoke, Esther could hear from her voice that she was crying. “Why didn’t you come home?”

Esther gave it some time, because she hadn’t hugged her little sister in ten years, and she wasn’t quite ready to stop yet. Then she drew back, took off Abe’s reading glasses, wiped her eyes, and told Joanna the truth.

The truth that Abe had told her, when she was eighteen, that her immunity to the wards was endangering everybody in the house. That Abe had given her a choice. She could stay and put herself and her family at risk—or she could leave and spend the rest of her life running. It hadn’t really been a choice because they had both known what she would do.

Joanna was silent as she listened though her feelings played out on her face like it was a stage. Shock, comprehension, dismay, fury, and finally, as Esther finished speaking, a sadness so deep it felt like leaning too far over the edge of a quarry. Esther had to look away before she lost her balance.

“Dad knew,” said Joanna. “He always knew you were a—what did Nicholas call you? A Scribe.”

“If I am.”

“You are,” said Joanna. “And he knew.”

“Yeah,” said Esther. “Probably.”

“He used me,” said Joanna. “He knew you’d never protect yourself the way you’d protect me, so he told you to run for my sake, not your own. But he didn’t givemea choice.”

Esther shook her head. “What kind of choice could he have given you?”

“The same one,” said Joanna. “To protectyou.I would have. I’d have gone with you or you’d have stayed here and we could’ve figured something out together. It wasn’t fair that he put it all on you. You were achild.”

“So were you.”

“I hate him,” said Joanna, though her face told an entirely different story.

“I don’t,” said Esther. She felt the heat of tears in her eyes again. “I miss him.”

Joanna covered her face with one hand, her back rising and falling, but her other hand reached out and found Esther’s. Despite her grief for her father, despite her exhaustion, despite everything, Esther felt a profound sense of... what was it? Something expansive and dizzying, like lying on her back under a night sky so filled with ancient stars that she felt the tininess of her own life like a flickering candle beneath them. Awe. That after ten years, Joanna was still her sister.

“But I don’t understand what this means,” Joanna said eventually. “Why that person—what was her name?”

“Maram.”

“Why Maram sent all of you here. Do you trust her?”

“I don’t know her,” said Esther. “So no. But...” She struggled to articulate her thoughts. “At least something’s happening. Something different. I couldn’t go on the way I have been.”

Joanna’s fingers tightened on hers, a silent press that felt like understanding. In the room around them, the small, ordinary relics of their father’s life lay quietly where he had left them: a watch waiting to be fastened, a handful of quarters waiting to be spent, a novel waiting to be read. For a while Esther and Joanna sat there together on the bed, both knowing they would soon need to break the stillness, stand, and move onward, but not quite yet. For just this moment, the world—like the watch, the quarters, the novel—could wait.

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