Chapter 5 - The Inventory of Betrayal
Mallory stepped past her mother, her boots dragging through the dirt as she gripped the pickets with both hands, her knuckles raw and red from the wind. Her carefully maintained suburban composure had cracked down the center, revealing the frantic, exhausted terror beneath.
"Paige, please," Mallory whispered, her voice breaking into a ragged, desperate sob that sounded shockingly like the twelve-year-old girl who used to hide under the blankets during thunderstorms. "Please. Just listen to me for one minute. We don't have anywhere else to go."
Paige looked at her twin. She saw the identical shape of their jawlines, the tiny white scar on Mallory's collarbone from when they had fallen off the tire swing together at eight years old, the way her sister's lower lip trembled when she was cornered. For twelve years, Paige had wondered what she would feel if Mallory ever came to her door. She had imagined rage; she had imagined cold, triumphant satisfaction; she had imagined slamming a door in her sister's face to balance the ledger.
She felt none of those things. She felt only a deep, exhausted sorrow—and an iron, immovable clarity.
"Where is the money, Mal?" Paige asked quietly.
"There is no money!" Mallory cried, tears finally cutting dark tracks through the dust on her cheeks. "The bank took the house! Grant’s business account had a tax levy from the IRS for ninety thousand dollars! They froze our personal checking on Friday! We literally had to use the cash from Mom’s grocery envelope just to put diesel in the U-Haul to get across the state line!"
"And you thought you would bring that debt here," Paige said.
"We thought you would help us!" Mallory screamed, rattling the steel with all her remaining strength. "You’re my sister! You’re my twin! We shared a room for eighteen years! How can you stand there in your warm clothes, on your huge piece of land, and watch my children freeze on the side of the road? What kind of monster are you?"
"The kind of monster you made when you locked me out of the house in November," Paige said.
"That wasn't my fault!" Mallory shrieked, her voice echoing off the limestone pillars. "Mom made that decision! I was eighteen and pregnant! I was terrified!"
"You stood in the upstairs window, Mallory," Paige said, her voice dropping into a register so quiet that Mallory had to stop sobbing to hear it. "I looked up while I was throwing my trash bags into the trunk of my car. You were standing behind the lace curtain in your bedroom, holding a cup of hot chocolate, and you watched me try to jump-start my car in the rain. You didn't come down the stairs. You didn't give me twenty dollars. You didn't even say goodbye."
Mallory froze. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. The memory was there, burned into the ledger between them, impossible to deny.
"And when I called you three years later," Paige continued, her hands remaining steady at her sides, "when I had finally saved five thousand dollars to put a deposit on my first commercial shaper, and I called to ask if Dad had left any of his hand planes in the attic—tools that his father had given him, tools that had nothing to do with money—do you remember what you told me?"
Mallory swallowed hard, her eyes darting away toward the grass.
"You told me that Grant had sold them at a garage sale for fifty bucks," Paige whispered. "Because you needed the space in the garage for a riding lawnmower."
Diane stepped up beside Mallory, her face pale, her hands trembling as she pulled her daughter back from the gate.
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"That is enough, Paige," Diane said, her voice shaking with an unstable mixture of rage and terror. "You have made your point. You have humiliated us. Are you happy now? Does it satisfy your petty, vindictive soul to see your mother and your sister reduced to this?"
"No, Diane," Paige said, looking through the black bars at the three adults who had defined her youth. "It doesn't make me happy at all. It just makes me certain."
