Free The Sister Season by Jennifer Scott Page A

him.”
    Over my dead body,
she wanted to proclaim, but aside from that being the poorest choice of words ever, at the moment she wasn’t so sure it was true. She wasn’t so sure Dusty wouldn’t get hold of a sympathetic judge who would rip Eli away like an old infected bandage. “He’s pretty mad at me,” she confessed instead.
    Eli finally turned to face her. “Why did you tell him? You told me you’d keep it a secret.”
    And she had. Of all the rotten things she’d done as a mom, even she knew that assuring him secrecy was one of the rottenest. But she’d been out of options. Promising Eli that she would tell no one about his suicidal plans was the only way she could get him to open up to her, and she was so hungry for some connection with her son, and so at a loss for how to find it, that she’d said the words before she’d even thought them through.
    “I had to tell him. He’s your dad.”
    “I’m not going to live with him. I’ll kill myself first,” Eli shot back, and Julia felt as if she’d been punched in the chest. This was the first time he’d made the threat so directly, and they were some of the most frightening and hopeless words a mother could hear.
    She knew she needed to do something, to say something, to call someone. This was it. He was making outward threats. It was time for intervention.
    But she was home. On this godforsaken farm. She was burying her father in five days. It was Christmas, for God’s sake.
    And, she had to admit to herself, she was weak. She’d spent so much of her identity in the professor half of herself, she had no idea how to be the mom half. She didn’t think she could live through it. She didn’t want to have a son with problems. She wasn’t equipped.
    “Don’t worry,” she told Eli, because soothing was the only thing she could think of that she had left. Was the only thing she’d been good at. “I’ll talk to Dusty again. I’ll calm him down.”
    She gazed into her son’s deep brown eyes, mostly buried under all that hair, and for the briefest second she thought she saw her baby in those eyes. The smiling, jolly little boy who loved to kick soccer balls at the park and who thought stars were the coolest thing ever. But then she noticed the crease between his eyebrows, the unhappy droop to the outer corners of his eyes, and the baby vanished. This was her son. Her hurting child. And she couldn’t fix him. Couldn’t reassure him with a clucking tone.
    He glared at her for what felt like forever, parted his lips as if to say something, then seemed to think it pointless and simply walked out of the kitchen, his threat lingering, ugly, beating in the room like a living thing.
    She was only vaguely aware of Bradley at the table, tapping on his BlackBerry. And then of him leaving the room without a single word. Probably to check on Maya. She’d said she wasn’t feeling well, after all.
    It wasn’t until much later, when her heart stopped banging so painfully against her ribs, that she realized.
    Bradley had not gone to check on his wife as she’d thought. He had not even gone upstairs.
    He had followed Claire to the sunporch.

Six
    E vening approached in slow motion. Behind the closed door to Maya’s room, it remained dark and quiet. The kids bustled around the kitchen with Elise, who had come away from the front door holding a casserole and saying something about the whole lot of them joining a slew of neighbors at Sharp’s for a dinner in Robert’s honor.
    “What a thoughtful invitation,” she’d said. “I’d never known he had such friends.”
    Julia had been shocked, quite honestly, to hear that her father had any friends at all. How could the same man who once yanked her pigtail so hard he came away with a fistful of hair be someone others thought of as decent? Not for the first time, Julia found herself wondering what kind of double life the man had lived—the abusive and ugly man at home, and the presentable one away. Surely he had