Chapter 10 - The Brother Who Had Already Chosen a Side
I wanted the email to be Diane’s.
That is difficult to admit.
I had already lost my idea of my mother.
I did not want to lose my brother too.
But when I showed Logan the printed email, his face collapsed.
He sat down.
No denial.
No confusion.
Just defeat.
“I was seventeen.”
I could barely speak.
“You wrote this?”
“Mom dictated most of it.”
The words rearranged everything again.
The car.
The diploma folder.
His warning at the party.
The expensive favors.
The contempt he had shown whenever I asked family questions.
Logan had not simply learned the secret and kept it.
He had participated.
At seventeen, Diane told him Rebecca was unstable and threatening to tear our family apart.
She showed him some of Rebecca’s old rehab records.
She told him I was finally doing well after years of childhood anxiety and that contact could destroy me.
Then she asked him to write the email because Rebecca might recognize Diane’s phrasing.
“You could've told me later.”
“I know.”
“When you were eighteen?”
“I know.”
“Twenty-one?”
“I know.”
“Twenty-five?”
He looked at the floor.
Each year made the excuse smaller.
“Why keep doing it?”
He laughed bitterly.
“Because once you've done something that bad, every year you hide it makes telling the truth worse.”
That answer sounded horribly human.
Then came the part I had not expected.
Diane had never paid Logan explicitly for secrecy.
The rewards came afterward.
Whenever he protected her version of the family, she became generous.
Money.
Cars.
Help with rent.
Business introductions.
Approval.
He learned the system.
So did she.
Neither needed to name it.
My graduation car key was the latest example.
A month earlier, Logan had found Grandma’s letters.
Diane panicked.
She asked him to remove the folder and bring it home.
After he did, she told him she had finally decided to buy him the car he wanted.
Three clues snapped together.
Diane’s extravagant gift at my celebration.
Logan’s instant fear when the envelope appeared.
His knowledge that I should not open something he supposedly had never seen.
The public favoritism had not merely been cruelty.
It was reinforcement.
Diane had rewarded the child who protected her secret while humiliating the one whose existence threatened it.
I stood.
Logan looked at me.
“Claire, please.”
“Don't call me for a while.”
“How long?”
May you like
I opened the door.
“For the first time in this family, I'm going to decide that.”
