“You’re provoking him, Claire.”
She glanced over my shoulder towards the dining room. “Perhaps you should ask him why he makes me want to…”
It stuck with me. When I mentioned it to Ryan later in the car, he just shrugged slightly.
“Maybe your sister just doesn’t like me.”
He said it gently, almost softly, as if I were making a big deal out of it. It was perhaps the first moment when something shifted, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
The closer the wedding date approached, the more Claire became a stranger.
One evening, the four of us were sitting around my parents’ dining table, eating a roast, when Claire suddenly put down her fork and looked me straight in the eyes.
“You should reconsider your plan to marry him, Alice.”
My mother froze, her glass halfway between her mouth and her mouth.
“What?” I laughed because I sincerely thought she was joking.
Claire didn’t smile. “I really mean it.”
A wave of heat rose to my face. “What’s wrong with you?”
Mom immediately retorted sharply: “Just because your sister has found someone nice doesn’t give you the right to ruin everything, Claire.”
Claire’s expression shifted into that familiar old wound — the one she had carried inside her ever since she had been labeled “difficult” so many times that it had practically become an integral part of her identity.
“I’m not trying to ruin anything,” she retorted.
Dad moved away from the table. “Then stop talking like that.”
Claire got up, went outside, and her bedroom door slammed shut in the hallway. No one followed her. I sat there while my parents turned her warning into bitterness, into jealousy, and Claire, quite simply, into Claire.
The following evening was my bachelorette party. Balloons. Sparkling cocktails. Way too much pink. I was trying to savor my happiness when Claire arrived late, her hair still wet from the rain, dressed in her work clothes.
