The Twin Missing From the Family Photo novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Nothing in It for Me

Somewhere over Ohio, Talbot stopped pretending to read the folder on his tray table.

Only a few days had gone by since the night of the logbook, and every one of them had been spent getting to this flight.

"You still haven't said why you're coming," I said.

"I told you at the studio. Ward Trail has a table at the gala."

"Talbot."

He closed the folder.

"I have a sister," he said. "She's twenty-nine. I haven't heard her voice in eight years."

I turned in my seat.

He kept his eyes on the seatback in front of him.

"My father died at our lake house when I was twenty-five. His heart. She was twenty-one, and she was in the kitchen with him when it happened."

"Did she call for help?"

"In four minutes. The ambulance took twenty-six." His jaw moved. "My mother needed it to be somebody's fault, and my uncle agreed with her. By the funeral it was my sister's. She had let him shovel the driveway. She had been too slow."

"And you believed it?"

"I didn't say I believed it. I didn't say I didn't." He rubbed the scar through his eyebrow. "I stood in the receiving line and said nothing, and she watched me do it."

"What did she do?"

"She left that week. She sent me one text. It said: You could have said one sentence."

"Did you write back?"

"I wrote forty answers. Now I send a card every December to the last address I have. None of them come back, and she has never answered."

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