He Let Me Grieve a Lie, Now He Begs Forgiveness novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Slip
Gemma kicked off her shoes and pulled her feet up onto the bed.
She looked happy.
It was the happiest Chiara had ever seen her, and Chiara had known her for exactly four hours.
"The festival was my idea," Gemma said. "Not yours. You never wanted to go. You had a portfolio due, and you kept saying next week."
Chiara kept her eyes on the sketchbooks.
"So I asked a favor from a friend. A woman I'd met."
"What kind of woman?"
"The kind who knows what people are afraid of." Gemma smiled. "She read palms at a booth near my school. She was very good at making people cry, and I was sixteen, and I wanted to see how it worked."
"What did you want from her?"
"I wanted Dad to look at me."
She said it lightly, and shrugged.
"He had a drawing of yours on his desk and a photo of you in his wallet. Did you know that? Eleven years of school plays, and he never took one picture of me to work. So I asked the psychic how to make someone scared enough to hold on."
"And she told you?"
"She said fear works best when it has a shape. A missing girl. A prophecy. A guilty sister."
Gemma leaned back on her elbows.
"I paid her four thousand dollars from my allowance, which was a lot then. She sent a man in a gray jacket to walk me out of the festival. I was gone for an hour. I came home crying and said you'd left me alone."
Chiara looked at her hands.
The one on her knee was perfectly still.
It was the only part of her she could trust.
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