Page 90 of The Favorite Sister

CHAPTER 22

Kelly

Iremember almost nothing of her funeral, except the parts of Yvette’s eulogy already trending on Twitter.

And Arch.

Arch came with her mother, but not her father. I felt dirty about that. Like he refused to pay his respects because he knew something in the water wasn’t clean.

We all rode together in the limo after the burial—my father; his wife, Susan; Layla; Arch; and Arch’s mother. At the curb, right outside of Patsy’s Pizzeria on Sixtieth, Brett’s favorite pizza in the city and now the site of her wake, Arch asks me to hang back a moment.

“I’ve got her,” my father says, his hand in the middle of Layla’s upper back. Layla seems sleepy, cried out, numb. She has barely let me out of her sight since Brett died, and truthfully, I’m afraid to stray too far from her. Layla is a welcome distraction. So long as she is around, I can focus on comforting her.I can suspend everything I am afraid to feel.

“We won’t stay long,” I promise her as my father and Susan escort her onto the curb. My father shuts the door. My father. I don’t think he believes my story any more than I do, but I also know he will never challenge it for Layla’s sake. Layla may be devastated, butshe is proud to be Brett Courtney’s niece—the Brett Courtney the public thought they knew.

“The rain held off,” Arch remarks to the gloomy window.

I nod, feeling like a spring-loaded trap moments from triggering. I have avoided being alone with Arch as much as possible this week. It was one thing to lie to her by omission when Brett was alive, quite another to insist that Brett and Stephanie had an affair ten months ago and that Vince found out about it and killed them both, which is the East Hampton Town Police Department’s working theory. I have my own working theory, but it’s nothing I can advance.

“Not that it would have mattered. Right?” Arch turns to me with a limp laugh, bunching a wet tissue beneath her chapped nose. She means because most of the women who attended the funeral wore sneakers, in Brett’s honor. They wouldn’t have had to worry about their heels sticking in the mud at the cemetery.

“It would have been okay either—”

“Was she still seeing her?” Arch demands. She cuts me off as soon as I open my mouth to respond, “Tell me the truth, Kel. Please.Pleasedon’t lie to me. Don’t let me be the dumb girlfriend who didn’t know.”

Oh, the cut of that. I don’t speak quickly enough to be believed. I can’t speak quickly enough to be believed. I feel gagged by my grief. “She wasn’t seeing her. She loved you, Arch.”

Arch shakes her head disgustedly, skinning her nostrils with that wet, dirty tissue. I reach into my purse, trying to find her a fresh one so that she doesn’t give herself an infection.

“She didn’t love me,” Arch says. “I didn’t want to admit it, because I loved her. But I could tell. She was never all there. I’m notcrazy. I won’t let you make me feel crazy. I know something was going on.”

I abandon the hunt for clean tissues and cover my chest with my hand. My heart feels old. It feels weak from hurting so many people. “Arch,” I gasp. “Please. I need you to believe she loved you. I love you and so does Layla. We will always be family.”

“Is it true?”she says to me, sounding stronger, like her anger has taken the lead now. Grief is just a partner dance between sorrow and fury. “Is it true you’re going to let them show what happened? That you’re getting your own show with Layla?”

I recommit myself to the clean tissue hunt so that I do not have to face her rightful disapproval. “The cameras were turned off when it happened. It doesn’t really show anything.”

“But you and Layla? You’re doing your own show?”

“It’s all focused on SPOKE. It will help so many Imazighen women and children, Arch.”

Arch starts to cry again. No. Wait. Is she...? She is. She’s laughing. A bitter, silent, wet, and red-faced laugh. “You do it all for those women and children, don’t you, Kel?” she says once she catches her breath. Then she climbs out of the car and closes the door so gently it doesn’t even click. I don’t imagine I’ll hear from her again.