Page 79 of Thicker Than Water
She sweeps her arm across the room, as if myown damn voiceis everywhere, dripping from the walls, blood spatter from a terrible crime—but all I hear is the echo of hers.
Timing my silences? Unbearable to everyone around me? Her words hollow me out, my chest aching and empty at once.
“And that’s great, Jules. I’m happy for you.” As Sienna’s voice breaks, the tears that fill her eyes look like shards of glass. “I just never thought you’d use your voice like this.”
Tears sting me, too. All over my body, I feel sliced open, slashed apart. When Sienna lowers her arm, I see a flash of red in her hand, as if she’s holding my wounds in her palm.
“What is that?” I ask, pointing to the dried blood.
She closes her fist. “Nothing.” She wipes her tears with her knuckles.
“That’s not nothing. Did you cut yourself?”
She shrugs—noncommittal, nonchalant.
“What happened?” I demand.
She sucks in her cheek, suppressing something. I’m about to call out her hypocrisy as she, too, refuses to speak, but then: she smiles. A slow spread of her lips. An oozing grin. An expression both villainous and victorious that makes me cold enough to shiver.
“I ran into Clive Clayton.”
My eyes widen, a flare of confusion before I’m rerouted back to horror. “Oh my god, did you— Is thathisblood?”
Sienna’s smile instantly dissolves. “Seriously? No. It’s mine. He was at Home Depot. He gave me some half-assed apology, said some bullshit things about Jason, and then I—I got so angry that my fingernail just— It—”
“You did that toyourself? Sienna!”
She opens her fist and raises her hand, showing me the cut more clearly. “You know what? I’m glad I did. It made me realize that I don’t need your mantra. It’s only ever held me back. And after I did this”—she turns her wrist to gaze into her palm—“I felt amazing. So I guess you were right about one thing, Jules. Idolove my rage. Because look what it does for me: it makes me strong.”
I shake my head, alarmed by the way she’s talking, the speed with which she’s spinning away from me—into dangerous territory. Today alone, she’s stalked a suspect, sliced open her hand, and I’m worried, now, what else she might do, how far she’ll go to confirm her belief in her brother.
For a moment, I can’t look away from the blood. I don’t see it the way Sienna does. I see only torn skin, broken vessels. I see suffering, not strength. And it scares me that our perspectives have skewed so far. Scares me, too, that she believes I’ve held her back.
But maybe, in a way, she’s right. I always thought I was helping her—taking her hand, whispering words to dull her rage—but maybe I only kept her from becoming what she wanted to be: a bright and burning thing.
And every time she spoke for me, three seconds in or not, maybe she only made it harder for me to speak for myself.
“Maybe,” I say, the word choked, “we’ve both been holding each other back.”
Sienna drops her hand. “What?”
I can’t bring myself to repeat it. And I can’t take it back.
Sienna and I stare at each other, our faces rebounding shock, our eyes equally blurred by tears, and it’s then that my phone rings, shattering our silence.
I have to blink several times before I can read the number. “It’s the hospital.”
Sienna lunges forward. “Answer it.”
I bring the phone to my ear, force out a greeting. I try to listen to the woman’s response, but my head feels fuzzy, my lungs tight, as if someone’s holding me underwater.
“I’m sorry,” I manage, “could you repeat that?”
As she speaks, I flash back to the call last week, the one about Jason’s accident, the one that set this all in motion. I thought I knew, then, how thoroughly my heart could break.
“Okay,” I say to the woman, finally understanding. “Yes. Yes, of course.”
When I end the call, I meet Sienna’s eyes, a glacial blue that should be cool, but has always burned like the center of a flame.
