YARA We’d been careful all through dinner, Dean and I, neither of us ready yet to announce what happened in the garden before dawn, just a glance across the table that carried the whole secret between us.
I don’t know yet that Yasmin has already decided the timing works in her favor.
I find out from the sound first, before I understand what I’m walking into.
Raised voices from the front parlor, Rhett’s low and confused, Yasmin’s high and broken, catching on sobs that arrive too perfectly timed to be entirely real, though I only understand that in hindsight.
My feet carry me toward the noise before my mind has fully decided to follow.
I push the door open just as Rhett turns to look at me, and whatever’s on my face must confirm something for him, because his own expression crumples immediately from confusion into something harder, colder.
I feel the shift in the room before I understand its cause, a chill settling over my skin like a held breath.
“Rhett?” I look between him and Yasmin, who’s curled into the settee with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, her whole body shaking with what looks, from where I’m standing, like genuine grief.
“What’s going on?” “Nothing,” Yasmin blurts, too quickly, dabbing at her eyes.
“I shouldn’t have said anything.
Please, forget I said anything at all.” “Said what?” Rhett’s jaw tightens, his eyes not quite meeting mine anymore.
“Yasmin told me about you and Colt Callahan,” he says, flat.
The name lands like a stone dropped into still water.
For a second I can’t make any words come out at all, my thoughts scattering in a dozen directions, none of them landing anywhere useful.
“There’s nothing to tell,” I say finally, my voice steadier than I feel.
“I never knew Colt Callahan.
I never met him in my life.” “That’s not what Yasmin said,” he mutters, jaw still tight.
“I didn’t say anything, really.” Yasmin’s voice trembles, soft and wounded, her hand pressed flat against her chest like she’s trying to hold her own heart together.
“I would never say anything that wasn’t kind about you, Yara.
I just, I saw some letters once, in your things, years ago, and I never thought anything of it until Dean showed up asking so many questions about a man from Texas, and I thought, surely it couldn’t be, surely my sister wouldn’t have kept something like that from all of us.” “I never had letters from anyone named Colt Callahan.” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to, panic climbing under the words, my hands curling into fists at my sides.
“Yasmin, whatever you think you saw, it wasn’t that.
It wasn’t me.” “I’m sure it wasn’t,” she says gently, full of sisterly reassurance, and it lands worse than an accusation ever could.
“I probably misunderstood.
I’m sorry, Rhett, I never should have brought it up at all.
It’s not my place to tell tales about my own sister, especially when I might have gotten it all wrong.” She hasn’t said one concrete thing.
That’s the whole architecture of it – nothing I can actually fight, no accusation solid enough to grab hold of and disprove, just enough doubt dressed up as tearful uncertainty to plant something ugly in Rhett’s mind and let it grow there on its own.
I watch his face harden further with every soft, uncertain word out of her mouth, the walls of the room pressing closer, the air gone thin, as if the whole house has decided to believe her too.
“I don’t understand what’s happening right now,” I say, my voice unsteady.
“I’ve never lied to either of you.
I don’t know why you’d say something like that, Yasmin, even if you thought you saw something.” “Because I love you.” Her eyes fill again, and this time a tear actually slips free, tracking down her cheek in a way that looks, infuriatingly, completely genuine.
“Because I’d rather you be angry at me for asking than let something terrible be true and never say a word.
Isn’t that what sisters are for?” “Rhett.” I turn to him, ignoring her entirely now, needing him to look at me and not at her.
“You’ve known me my whole life.
You know exactly who I am.
Ask yourself honestly, have I ever once lied to you?
About anything, ever?” He looks at me then, really looks, and for a moment something wavers behind his eyes, the careful distance cracking just slightly.
“No,” he admits, quiet.
“You haven’t.” “Then trust that.
Not a story about letters nobody’s ever seen, not tears over something that supposedly happened years ago that nobody can name a single detail about.
Trust what you actually know.” He’s quiet a long moment, torn, I can see it, some part of him wanting to believe me and some part of him already half convinced by nothing more than his sister’s tears and the terrible, formless shape of an accusation with no edges to grab hold of.
“I don’t know what to think right now,” he says finally, and it isn’t a rejection, not quite, but it isn’t the answer I needed either.
“I just need some time, Yara.
Both of you, just, give me some time.” It isn’t closed off entirely.
It isn’t nothing.
But it isn’t the trust I was hoping for either, and something in my chest aches watching him leave the room without quite looking at either of us, caught between two versions of a story only one of us is actually telling honestly.
I leave before I say something I’ll regret.
I don’t know where I’m going until I find myself outside, walking the garden path in the dark.
That’s when I see the light.
A small fire, low and contained, burns in the old stone urn near the far hedge, the one the gardeners sometimes use for burning leaves and debris.
Yasmin stands over it, alone, feeding something into the flames piece by piece, methodical, unhurried, as though she has all the time in the world and nothing at all to hide.
I move closer without meaning to be quiet about it, and she doesn’t hear me until I’m almost beside her, my footsteps swallowed by the crackle of burning paper.
Scraps of paper curl and blacken in the fire, torn small enough that I can’t make out what any of them once said, just fragments of handwriting eaten away by flame before I can read a single word.
The smoke carries a scent I recognize before I’m close enough to see clearly – sweet, cloying, unmistakably wrong, the same wrongness that clung to the scarf in her dresser drawer, the same wrongness that clung to the letter I found in Beau’s study.
My stomach turns.
My pulse quickens with recognition even before my mind catches up to what it means.
“What are you burning?” I ask, quiet.
Yasmin looks up.
For one full second, her face goes completely blank.
Not tears.
Not sorrow.
Nothing at all, empty and still, like a house with all the lights switched off at once, and behind that emptiness, something cold and assessing that has nothing to do with the grieving sister who cried so beautifully in the parlor twenty minutes ago.
It’s only a second, but it’s long enough to make my blood run cold, long enough that I know I haven’t imagined it.
Then the mask slides back into place, quick and seamless, as though it had never slipped at all.
“Old letters,” she says, soft and mournful, dabbing at her eyes that are, impossibly, wet again already.
“Things I probably should have burned a long time ago.” CREATORS’ THOUGHTS June_Calva81 Creation is hard, cheer me up!