“I didn’t know.”
Grandma reached for my hand.
“Clara, loving your father doesn’t mean pretending he never made mistakes.”
I looked toward the ballroom doors.
“Vanessa never told me any of this.”
“Perhaps she didn’t know how.”
I remembered our father’s funeral.
Vanessa and I stood together beside his coffin.
She’d held my hand so tightly that our fingers ached.
When the service ended, she whispered, “We still have each other.”
I’d believed her.
Maybe she’d wanted to believe it too.
But afterward, the years we’d experienced differently had become harder to ignore.
She began referring to my mother as “Robert’s second wife.”
Then she stopped inviting my mother to family gatherings.
Eventually, she started describing me as though I belonged to a separate branch of the family.
I’d been hurt.
But I hadn’t understood where the hurt began.
Now I was starting to.
That didn’t make the empty chair acceptable.
It did make me wonder whether Vanessa was trying to punish me for something neither of us could change.
Adrian found us twenty minutes later.
He’d removed his tuxedo jacket and looked as though he’d spent the interval arguing with someone.
“Clara, can we talk?”
Grandma straightened.
“Has Vanessa sent you to bring us back?”
“No, Margaret. I came because I owe Clara an apology.”
I stood.
“For what?”
“For not knowing what was happening.”
