“More than I do.”
That concerned her.
Inside, she made tea nobody drank.
Then she sat opposite me at the old oak dining table.
“You really don’t remember Claire?”
“No.”
Margaret nodded slowly.
“I always wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
“Whether you’d remember eventually.”
“She was my sister?”
“Half sister.”
My heart beat faster.
“Whose daughter?”
“Your father’s.”
Margaret folded her hands.
“He was nineteen when Claire was born. Her mother was a girl he knew from school. They never married. Claire mostly grew up with her mother in another state.”
That explained why I didn’t remember living with her.
“Did I know her?”
“Oh, yes.”
Margaret smiled sadly.
“You adored her.”
Something inside me shifted.
“You saw her perhaps six or seven times. She’d visit your father. She used to carry you everywhere.”
I stared at Claire’s photograph.
No memory came.
“Why did everyone pretend she never existed?”
Margaret looked down.
