My Sister's Cure Was Always My Man novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Everyone Heard

The young man stood at the end of the table with his hands shaking.

Everyone was looking at him.

"I don't want to be here," he said. "I'll say it fast."

He said it in four sentences.

Bianca came into his room at night, said she couldn't feel anything unless she was touched, and cried when he said no.

In the morning she told his girlfriend he had attacked her.

He lost the girlfriend, and the lease, and most of his friends.

"That's her voice on the recording," he said. "It's the only thing I have left that shows I didn't do it."

The dining room was silent.

Mom was the first to find her tongue.

"This is a stranger," she said. "He's lying. He wants money. Look at that jacket."

"I don't want money," the young man said.

"He's a predator!" Bianca screamed. "He grabbed me!"

"That's my voice saying get back to the couch," he said, quietly. "You can hear it."

"I can't hear anything."

"Everyone heard," said Caleb's father.

He had not raised his voice.

He folded his napkin and set it beside his bowl.

"I have spent forty years learning what frightened people sound like," he said. "I have heard that man on the recording. He is frightened. She is not."

Mom's mouth opened and closed.

My uncle stood up, at the far end of the table.

He was a thin, mild man, in the clean shirt, and nobody had ever heard him speak at a family dinner.

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