Claiming the Spare Twin novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Her Mother's Grave

I found my sister at our mother's grave, in the rain, on her knees in a white dress.

The burying ground was behind the Moot Hall, a slope of old stones under cedar trees.

Dorran had stopped at the gate without being asked, and I could feel him there, a warm weight at my back.

Rosalie heard me coming and did not turn around.

"Go away, Til."

"No."

"I mean it. You've won. You have the stone and the ledger and your tall dark alpha. Go and be happy."

"Is that what you came out here to tell Mom?"

Her shoulders jerked.

I stopped a few feet behind her, and the rain ran down inside my collar.

The headstone said Marrow, Healer, and under it, in smaller letters, Beloved wife.

"Dad chose that line," Rosalie said. "He picked all of it. The stone, the verse, the flowers. He cried so hard at the funeral that people held him up."

"I remember."

"He wasn't crying about her." She turned around then, and her face was bare, no smile on it, red-eyed and blotched.

I hadn't seen my sister's real face in years.

"He told me when I was twelve," she said. "I found the cup on the counter, and the bottle behind the flour, and I asked what it was. He said it was medicine to keep you safe. That your wolf was too strong and would hurt you."

"And you believed him."

"For a year, maybe."

"And after that?"

"After that I carried the cup anyway."

She said it in a whisper.

I had known it, and it still landed.

"Why?"

"Because he said it was the only way I'd get to keep my life." Her laugh was thin and ugly. "Do you know what it's like to be the one everybody loves? You can never be wrong. Everyone's watching to see you smile. And one wrong move, and Dad takes it back."

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