I Gave My Sister My Fiancé and Watched Them Fall novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: What Melisande Knew

"Speak," I said.

Melisande pushed herself up on one elbow.

My mother tried to help her and Melisande shook her off.

"I was ten," Melisande said.

The hall was so quiet that her thread of a voice carried to the back wall.

"I had a bad night. A coughing fit, one of the long ones. You were seven, and you slept in the next bed."

"I remember."

"You woke up and came across the floor in your nightgown. You put your hand on my back."

Her eyes were fixed on mine.

"The cough stopped," she said. "Right then, under your hand, with that heat going through me. I felt it, Yvaine.

"I lay there until you fell asleep with your hand on my spine, and I knew what you were."

"I was seven. I would have told you everything."

"I was a child who had been dying for five years, and I had just found out that my little sister could stop it." Her breath whistled. "I never told anyone. I never told you."

"Why not?"

"Because I was afraid you'd stop."

Nobody in the hall moved.

I looked at my sister and saw, for the first time, a frightened girl in a shawl, and not the shining center of my family.

It did not make me forgive her.

It made me see her plainly.

"You let me think I was nothing," I said.

"Yes."

"You let me stand beside Tobias for two years, knowing what he was taking."

"I told myself you didn't mind. I told myself you were so strong, and it cost you nothing." She was crying now, weakly. "It wasn't true. I knew it wasn't. I let myself believe it because I wanted to live."

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