I Left to Make Him Follow, and He Let Me Go for Three Years novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: You Asked Me Once

I did not say anything until we were home and the bedroom door was shut.

Ansel stood by the dresser, still in his coat.

I stood by the bed with the program in my hand.

"Who is Marta?" I asked.

He took off the coat.

He folded it over the chair and smoothed the sleeve.

I watched him do it, and I knew every second he spent on the coat was a second he was keeping.

"My sister," said Ansel.

The word dropped into the room.

I had not known he had a sister.

In five years of marriage nobody had told me, not him, not his mother, not the uncle or the cousins or the aunts who came at Christmas.

"You have a sister," I said.

"I had a sister. She was nineteen." He sat on the end of the bed with his hands hanging between his knees. "She died eleven years ago, on the ninth of October, in a car on the Parkway, in the rain."

I sat down beside him and did not touch him.

"Oh, Ansel," I said.

"She was driving home from the glass school. A truck lost its brakes on the wet road." His voice was level, and it cost him. "She was in the hospital for two days. On the second night they told us she would not wake."

"I'm so sorry."

"My mother could not sign the papers. She could not make her hand work. My father was already dead." He looked at his hands. "I was twenty-three, and I signed my sister away to strangers on a clipboard."

"Signed what away?" I asked.

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