"I don't want to see you right now" is what she said. What she means is something I don't have the strength to survive, so I do what every idiot in the history of catastrophic decisions does—I stay.
"Blythe, please." I press my palms into the duvet because reaching for her would be the wrong move right now, and my hands need a job that isn't making everything worse. "Just let me explain."
"Explain." She turns the word over like a stone she's deciding whether to throw. "Go ahead. Explain how you watched me swallow pills every morning for two years and told me they were vitamins."
"They were zinc supplements—part of the chelation protocol, and the treatment has been working." My voice sounds clinical, detached, like I'm reading from a pamphlet instead of sitting on a bed I can't afford. "Your levels have been stable for over a year, B."
"Don't." Her hand comes up, palm flat, and the gesture is so much like mine that my teeth meet hard enough to send a crack through my temple. "Don't talk to me about levels like I'm a chart on a clipboard."
"That's why I did it—because you're my sister." My thumbnail drives into the pad of my finger hard enough to leave its own crescent. "Because I already watched this disease take someone—"
"Did Mum know?" The question slices through everything—my half-built defence, the lavender dusk beyond the bay window, the careful distance between us on this cream duvet. "Before she died. Did she know she'd passed it on?"
My mouth opens. The word I need is small—three letters, easy to say, impossible to survive saying. I deliver it to the space between us rather than to her face.
"Yes."
Somewhere downstairs, Oliver's voice rises in a one-sided negotiation about bedtime. The ordinary sound presses against the silence in this room until something has to give.
"She knew." Blythe's jaw moves once, a slow lateral grind I've watched her practise on a hundred different heartbreaks. "She told you, and the two of you decided I didn't get a seat at the conversation about my own body."
"She was dying, B." My throat works twice around the consonant. "She told me because someone had to take over when she couldn't, and there was nobody else standing in that corridor who could manage it."
"Manage." She stands and the movement is so controlled that every joint she locks into place might as well be a door shutting. "That's what you've been doing for two and a half years. Managing me."
She paces—three steps to the window, three back, the room too small for what she's carrying. "Scheduling blood draws around my school calendar so I wouldn't ask questions. Telling the pharmacist my name while I sat outside thinking you were picking up antihistamines."
"I had a right to know what was happening inside my own body." She stops mid-stride, hands balled at her sides. "Mine. Not yours to monitor in secret, not yours to medicate from a kitchen drawer."
"I was trying to give you something normal." My voice cracks at a seam I didn't know existed, and the sound of it in this quiet, expensive room is obscene. "Four years watching Mum disappear—her hands shaking, the jaundice. I was not handing you that at fourteen."
"So you made the choice for me." She reaches the window, her reflection ghosted in the glass. Her voice drops to the register I built for Dennis—flat, measured, stripped clean.
"You decided what I could handle. What I deserved to know about my own diagnosis, my own genetics." She turns, and what comes next is quiet enough to peel wallpaper. "You controlled every piece of information that touched my life and called it protection."
My hands seize the duvet and my knuckles go bone-white against the cream cotton. "That is not the same—"
"It's exactly what he does." She doesn't raise her voice—the sentence carries its own detonation without help. "Dad decides we're too stupid for truth. You decide I'm too fragile."
She crosses her arms, mirroring every defensive posture I've ever built in that Kettleworth kitchen. "Different wrapping, Cora."
My body recoils before my brain catches the sentence—spine against the headboard, ribs folding in. My sister put me in a drawer next to a man who held a broken bottle to her face, and the comparison rings through the room like a slap.
Three full seconds pass where I cannot find the argument against it. Three seconds of staring at a sixteen-year-old in a borrowed bedroom while every justification I've rehearsed since her diagnosis collapses into rubble at my feet.
"I am nothing like Dennis." The words come out jagged, and my chin is doing something I can't stop. "Every shift, every form, every pill I crushed into your juice—because I watched this disease eat Mum from the inside, and I'd have set myself on fire before letting you stand in that same shadow."
"Normal ended when Mum died." Her eyes are dry—completely, mercilessly dry, the way only a Whitfield woman's can be when tears would actually be easier. "You know that better than anyone. You were seventeen in a hospital corridor holding my hand."
The sentence reaches between my ribs and finds the thing I've been cupping in both hands since that corridor. My mouth opens and nothing follows—no defence, no grim punchline, just air past teeth that can't form a single word.
"Leave." Not anger—something past it, on the other side, where the ground is flat and empty. Just a girl at a window asking for the one thing left she can control. "Please, Cora."
I stand. My legs work, which seems medically unreasonable given the proportions of what just happened. The sketchbook sits beside the medical file, edges aligned with the neatness of a girl who grew up in chaos, and I walk past both because my hands have lost that right.
Edmund is in the hallway, shoulders against the wall, arms crossed low. He heard all of it—the catalogued lies, the Dennis comparison, the three seconds where I couldn't answer.
His eyes find mine and whatever's written there keeps his mouth shut. The kindest thing he's done for me all week, and the competition for that title has been stiff.
My car sits under a Highgate streetlight that actually works, because this borough maintains things. I close the door and the silence is absolute—no pipes rattling through walls, no pencil scratching in the next room, no drunk snoring on a couch six feet from my bedroom.
Four rings. Voicemail—her recorded voice asking me to leave a message with the cheerfulness of a girl I apparently never let exist fully informed. I hang up and stare at the screen until it dims.
I call again. Same four rings, same recording, same unbearable brightness on the other end of a line she's choosing not to answer.
My thumbs hover over the keyboard, then type the only sentence I have left: I'm sorry. I'm not going anywhere.
The message delivers. The screen holds still—no typing bubble, no read receipt, just grey text glowing in a car parked outside a house where my sister sleeps on sheets I didn't buy, recovering from a truth I buried for nine hundred and twelve days.
The read receipt never comes.