Page 151 of Godbound
“And are you so terrified of rejection that you’ve been dragging yourself after me for years?” I scream. “Hiding the truth that we shared the same mother because you were too scared to face the chance that I wouldn’t hate you for it?”
The words tore out of me, wild and full of grief. “You had her. Even in that hellish place, you had her. And I didn’t. She sang to you, didn’t she? Told you stories. Stories that were supposed to be mine.”
My voice cracks as the truth I’ve been shoving down finally spills free.
“I was left with beatings,” I hiss. “Shame. Silence. Loneliness. I longed for her. And you—” I choke out the rest. “You knew. You knew this whole time. And you lied. I told you what I remembered of her. I asked you to share whatever you knew, and you gave me scraps. Scraps!”
Peonica flinches. Her jaw clenches, and for a second, I think she might just turn around and leave this room. But instead, she speaks. Her voice is quiet.
“I gave you scraps,” she says. “Because that’s all I ever had.” She crosses her arms, but it looks more like she’s holding herself together than putting up a wall.
“You think I had her?” she says. “I had a mother who was never really there. Her body was in the room, sure. But her mind? It was always somewhere else, always with you.”
She exhales sharply, like the words cost her.
“She worked every second she could, and when she did sit down withme, when she did speak tome… it was always about you. Her other daughter she visited at night. How bright you were. How fast you were learning. How much she missed you on the rare nights she’d choose to stay with me.”
Peonica swallows. A brittle sound escapes her lips.
“She never taught me the things she bragged about you knowing. She never noticed I was right there, wanting her. All I ever got was the echo of her love for you.” Her voice shakes now. “I waited for her to look at me the way she looked when she spoke of you. I kept thinking if I just do more, be more, maybe she’ll see me. But she never did.”
Her eyes rise to meet mine. She sees the tears in mine too, and for a moment, we’re just two daughters, wrecked by the same woman, in opposite ways.
“I didn’t tell you,” she says softly, “because I couldn’t be that girl again. The girl who lives in the spaces between people. The bridge you want just to walk over.”
I want to scream. I want to crumple. Because I finally see her. Not the girl who stole what I had. Not the liar who fed me crumbs. But my sister. A child, just like me, trying to survive her mother’s absence while living in her presence.
I thought I was the one abandoned. But so was she, just in a different room. And suddenly, it isn’t about what she had that I didn’t. It’s about what we both lost.
I step forward. Slowly.
She doesn’t move. Doesn’t flinch this time. But her arms drop to her sides like she’s no longer afraid to be seen.
“I hated you from the moment I found out,” I whisper. “Because I thought you had everything I wanted.”
Peonica nods, her voice barely audible. “And I hated you because you complained so much about her abandoning you while you were the only thing she ever wanted.”
Silence blooms. And in it, something mends.
I reach for her hand. She doesn’t pull away. Finally, we’re not standing on either side of a bridge, we’re meeting in the middle.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Peonica sniffles, squeezes once, then pulls away to wipe at her eyes. When she drops her hands, a wry smirk is on her lips. “For being so afraid of the word sister you reduced it to ‘sharing a mother’?” she says, half-mocking. The vulnerability between us has clearly rattled her.
I don’t blame her. We’ve both spent so long surviving our own versions of abandonment, it’s going to take time to adjust to our new reality.
So I lift a brow, force a breath of levity into my voice, and say, “Sorry it took me this long to realize you’re the younger sister, and it is my job to make you listen to me, not let you sneak into forbidden libraries and dig through cursed artifact histories.”
Peonica nods solemnly, like I’ve just uncovered some great universal truth. “I’m glad you finally admit that all of this is your fault.”
I tilt my head with a smile. “Well, now that you’ve almost died for your research, did you at least find anything useful?” I ask lightly, though a ripple of worry curls in my stomach, coiling tighter as I wait for her answer.
Peonica gives me a strange look, like she’s weighing her next words with caution. Sorting through them, picking each one carefully. Then her expression softens into what looks like resignation.
I open my mouth to tell her to just spit it out, but she beats me to it.
“The ring is what he says it is,” she says. “One of the old artifacts, apparently made by a witch like the rest of them.”
