YARA Yasmin finds me still on the garden bench, not ten minutes after Rhett’s gone, the cicadas back in full chorus like nothing ever silenced them.
She comes toward me slow, careful, her face arranged into something soft and worried, and if I hadn’t just watched that same face go sharp and calculating in the shadow of the magnolias, I might actually believe what I’m seeing now.
That’s the trouble with Yasmin – she’s had a lifetime to perfect this particular performance, and even knowing better, some small, tired part of me still wants to fall for it.
“There you are, sweetheart.” She settles onto the bench beside me, close, her hand finding mine the way it always does, warm and certain.
“I saw Rhett heading back to the house looking like somebody died.
What happened, honey?” “He told me how he feels about me.” “Oh, Yara.” Her voice softens further, sympathetic, sisterly, exactly the register she used the morning after the breakfast argument, all those weeks ago now, though it feels like a lifetime.
“That must have been so hard on you.
Poor Rhett.” She squeezes my hand.
“What did you tell him?” “That I need time.” “That’s very kind of you.” She says it warmly, like she means it, like there’s nothing underneath the words but genuine sisterly concern.
“Not everyone would have handled it so gently.” She strokes her thumb once over my knuckles, considering.
“You know, maybe you should take some real time.
Away from all of us.
I could smooth things over with Rhett myself, tell him you just need space, let you rest without anybody hovering over you asking questions.” She says it like a gift, generous, easy, already halfway to arranging it in her mind.
“You wouldn’t have to explain yourself to anyone.
I’d handle it.” It sounds like kindness.
It sounds, almost, like love.
But something in me recoils from it anyway, quiet and certain, the same instinct that flinched from her hand on my arm weeks ago.
She isn’t offering me rest.
She’s offering to be the only voice left in the room once everyone else has been gently, lovingly cleared out of it.
I sit with her a moment, letting the sympathy wash over me the way it’s supposed to.
Some tired, worn-down part of me wants badly to just accept it, to let myself believe, for once, that my sister is exactly who she’s performing right now.
It would be so much easier than the alternative.
It would cost me so much less.
I could close my eyes and pretend, just for tonight, that I still have a sister instead of an opponent.
But I felt what I felt in the shadow of those magnolias, and that knowing won’t let me rest in the comfort she’s offering.
“You heard us,” I say, my voice flat.
“Didn’t you.
In the garden.” Something flickers behind her eyes, there and gone, quick as a blink.
“I might have caught the tail end of it,” she admits, easy, unbothered, no shame in it at all.
“I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.
I was just coming back from my walk.” “What did you hear?” “Enough to know my brother’s heart is broken,” she says, tilting her head, studying me, something considering behind the softness now, faint but there if I know to look for it.
“You really don’t feel anything for him?
Not even a little?” “I care about him.
That’s not the same thing.” “No,” she agrees, slow, thoughtful.
“It’s not.” We sit there a while longer.
She keeps talking, soft and warm, about Rhett, about how he’ll recover, about how these things have a way of working themselves out in time, and the whole while I feel it underneath her voice, something I can’t quite name but recognize instantly, the same wrongness that clung to Caroline’s letter, sharp and metallic under all that sugar.
I want so badly to be wrong about it.
I never am, not about this, and the knowing exhausts me more than the sensing does.
It isn’t sadness I’m sensing from her.
It isn’t even satisfaction exactly, not on the surface.
But somewhere beneath the sympathy, threaded so fine I almost miss it, there’s something that feels dangerously close to relief.
Like it was useful.
I don’t say anything about it.
I’ve learned by now exactly what happens when I try to name what I sense in this house before I have proof solid enough to hold up against her tears – the tears always come first, and they always win.
So I let her walk me back inside, let her chatter fade into the ordinary hum of the house settling into evening, and I go to bed early, exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the hour.
I don’t fall asleep easily.
My mind keeps circling: Rhett’s face when I told him I needed time, Yasmin’s face in the shadow of the magnolias, the strange, cold satisfaction I felt humming under all that warmth on the bench.
I turn onto my side, then onto my back, chasing sleep the way I’ve chased answers all evening, without success.
Eventually, though, exhaustion wins, and I drift down into something heavy and dreamless.
I wake sometime past midnight, my eyes opening onto the dark of my own room.
My skin prickles with the certainty that something has changed since I closed them – a coolness where the air should be still, the faint creak of a floorboard settling.
Yasmin is standing at the foot of my bed.
She’s perfectly still, a pale shape in the moonlight coming through the curtains, her nightgown ghostly white, her hair loose around her shoulders.
I can’t see her face clearly in the dark, just the shape of her, watching.
Neither of us moves.
My heart slams once, hard, against my ribs, and I have to remind myself to breathe.
“Yasmin?” I ask, my voice smaller than I want it to be, still thick with sleep, my heart already picking up speed.
“What are you doing?” She doesn’t answer right away.
She just stands there, watching me, and something about the stillness of her, the total silence of it, makes the hair rise on my arms the way it did over the bird on the trail, the same wrongness, the same certainty that whatever I’m looking at isn’t quite what it’s pretending to be.
I want to reach for the lamp, but my hand won’t move, as if some old animal instinct is telling me that stillness is safer.
“I was just checking on you,” she says finally, her voice soft, almost tender, drifting across the dark room like something meant to soothe me back to sleep.
She doesn’t move for a long moment after that.
She just stands there at the foot of my bed, watching me with an expression I can’t read in the dark.
Some part of me feels certain that if the lights were on, I wouldn’t recognize what I found on her face at all, that whatever lives beneath her calm has nothing gentle in it.
Then, without another word, she turns and slips out of my room, closing the door behind her so softly I barely hear the latch catch.
I lie frozen for a long time after, staring at the space where she stood, trying to reconstruct her face from memory, whatever I saw or didn’t see in the dark.
I reach toward the lamp on my nightstand once, fingers actually brushing the switch, and then I stop myself, some cold, small fear rising up that if I turn on the light and cross the room to check the door, I might find it isn’t locked the way I left it, or worse, that I might find nothing wrong at all and have to admit I’m starting to doubt my own eyes in the dark.
I take my hand back from the lamp.
I lie there instead, staring up at the ceiling, wide awake, replaying five words that shouldn’t frighten me and do.
I was just checking on you.
Checking for what.
Checking on what.
I don’t have an answer, and somehow that’s worse than any answer could have been.