His Forbidden Little Sister

My mother knocks like she is asking permission to be my mother. Two soft taps, and a pause just long enough for me to consider pretending I am not home. I have never once taken that option, mostly because I am a coward, but also because some tiny idiot part of me always hopes this time will be different.

"Come in," I said, sitting in my mirror, with half my hair still down, while I continue what I'm doing.

She stepped in holding a wrapped box smaller than the one Roman had given me, wrapped in paper that shows it was from the store closer to us here, and she would never normally shop there which told me that it won't be different this time, even before she said a single word. My mother does not give gifts casually. Affection in our house has always been rationed like something she is afraid of running out of, most of it spent making sure Nathaniel Grimwood never regrets marrying her. I used to think that meant she loved him more than she loved me. It took me years to understand that maybe, just maybe, I should never think about what it was, and by then the damage resulting from thinking had already settled somewhere permanent in my chest.

"For your graduation," she said, setting it on my desk without quite meeting my eyes. "I should have given it to you earlier."

I opened it slowly, mostly because a small mean part of me wanted her to sit in the silence a little longer. Inside was a delicate silver bracelet, tasteful. I turned it over, waiting for the part where she told me what it actually meant, what the terms and conditions were, because with my mother there is always a part like that. She does not do plain gifts. She does gifts only with terms and conditions.

"It's beautiful," I said. "Thank you."

She sat on the edge of my bed and smoothed her dress over her knees, and I recognized the posture immediately, the one she uses right before delivering a sentence that is meant to meet you in a place that'll leave you completely destabilized.

I braced reflexively. My whole body does this thing now, this quiet flinch that it does whenever I see her make that particular look, the same flinch I used to do when I heard Dad's key in the door before she finally chose to change the locks. Old fear does not really leave. It just changes who it is afraid of.

"You graduated today," she said. "You're a grown woman, Rosalie. You have your degree, a very good one in a prestigious college. Opportunities most girls your age would kill for, because of this family."

"I know. I'm grateful." I am, actually. That is the annoying part. I can be grateful and furious in the same breath and nobody ever tells you that combination is allowed, that you are permitted to owe someone everything and resent them slightly at the same time, and that both things can be completely true.

"Good." She nodded, mostly to herself, like she was checking a box on a list only she could see. "Because I think it's time you found your own place. An apartment. Somewhere age appropriate."

The room went very quiet, and I could feel myself freezing completely. I set the bracelet down, as my hands needed something to hold besides the sudden cold spreading through my chest like a spilled drink soaking through fabric you cannot save.

"You want me to move out."

"I want you to grow." Too fast. The correction of someone who has practiced the sentence enough times that it no longer sounds like her own idea. "It isn't good for a girl your age to still be living under her stepfather's roof. People talk, Rosalie. You know how people talk in this family's circles. It reflects on all of us."

"It reflects on you," I said quietly.

She did not deny it. That was the worst part, the silence doing the confirming for her, the same silence I had watched her live inside for eight years, ever since she married a man richer and colder than any man deserves to be and decided her entire survival depended on being agreeable, small, easy to keep. I remember the exact day she told me we were moving into the Grimwood house, how she held my face in both hands and said, we are safe now, nobody is ever going to hurt you here, and how young I was when I believed that meant something different than being convenient.

I understand it. Some days I even forgive her for it. Understanding something does not make it hurt less. Nobody tells you that either.

"I've already found you a place," she went on, stirring the conversation the way she does when she needs the subject closed fast. "A nice building. Not far. Your own space, your own life. Isn't that what every girl your age wants?"

I thought about telling her the truth. That I do not want my own space. That I do not want a nice building not far away. That the only thing I actually want is currently two doors down the hall pretending not to notice the way I look at him over breakfast, and that leaving this house means leaving him, and leaving him feels like being told to hold my breath permanently and call it healthy. I thought about telling her that the one time in eight years I had ever truly felt safe in this family was because of my stepbrother, not because of the marriage she had built her entire life around protecting.

I said none of it. I have gotten very good at swallowing every single thing I really want to say. It is, if I am honest, my single most reliable skill.

"Okay," I said instead. "I'll move out."

Her shoulders dropped. The relief flooding through her was visible, like she had been holding a full breath the entire conversation and only now let it go. She stood and pressed a brief kiss to the top of my head, an old habit from when a kiss like that actually meant something instead of feeling like a transaction closing.

"You're a good girl," she said. "You always have been."

Then she left, quick and quiet, the way people leave a room once they have gotten exactly what they came for.

I sat there with the bracelet still on my desk, the party downstairs already gathering noise through the floorboards. I thought about every night Roman had found me curled up somewhere small and cried out, never once making me explain, just sitting there until it passed, patient in a way nobody had ever bothered to be with me before him. I thought about the note still folded inside my jewelry box, the ink was slightly faded, the only proof I had that someone in this family had once decided I was worth protecting for reasons that had nothing to do with appearances. I thought about how there would be no more nights like that. No more accidental hands brushing in hallways. No more him, not really, not in the way that had quietly become the only good thing I had.

I didn't know exactly how it happened, but I realized tears were dropping from my eyes. There was really no time for that, so I composed myself and took the little time to redo my makeup, then I stood, smoothed my dress, and walked downstairs to a party thrown in my honor, carrying a goodbye that nobody else in that house even knew had already happened.

Nobody, except possibly the one person I was about to spend the whole night trying not to look at, and failing, the way I always fail, the way I was apparently always going to fail, right up until the moment failing stopped being something I could recover from.