Free Once More With Feeling by Megan Crane Page B

unless she was holding her hand in the ICU waiting room and offering her support she didn’t deserve.
    ‘It is entirely about Carolyn,’ I said, cutting her off. ‘And you know it.’
    ‘Don’t play the attorney with me, Sarah,’ Mom snapped back at me. ‘This is not a courtroom!’
    ‘All right, that’s enough,’ Dad said then. He reached over and put his hand on mine, giving my fingers a quick squeeze. I wanted to yank my hand away, but restrained myself. ‘No one is choosing sides, sweetheart. We’re your parents and we’re also Carolyn’s parents. That makes us neutral parties in this.’
    I looked at him for a moment, and then I looked at my mother. I thought about my sister. I thought about all the little things we’d all swept aside over the years, all the minor indications that Carolyn had no boundaries and no moral compass, and worst of all, no sense that she should ever restrain herself from going after what she wanted. So she never had. And look what had come of it.
    In my bed.
    With my husband.
    Fucking doggy-style.
    ‘If you’re claiming that you’re neutral,’ I said quietly,pulling on some inner strength I didn’t know I had, when all I wanted to do was scream and sob and howl and break things, ‘you’re actually choosing sides.’
    I moved my hand away from his. Pointedly, I admit.
    ‘Sarah—’ Dad started, frowning so hard that his regulation college professor beard bristled slightly.
    ‘There aren’t sides to take,’ I continued, ignoring him. And then I started acting like the lawyer I was. Because this was a courtroom. Of course it was. This family had never been anything else. I held up my left hand, palm up. ‘Here’s Carolyn, who had an affair with my husband, who let me walk in on her in my bed with said husband, who broke up my marriage, and who then announced she was going to have my husband’s baby.’ I raised my right hand. ‘And here’s me.’ I waited a beat, and then looked at each of my parents in turn. ‘How are those two things the same? How do they even compare?’
    For a moment, they were both quiet. I saw them exchange a look. A whole conversation in a single glance.
    ‘Carolyn is our daughter too,’ my father said eventually, with a ring of finality in his voice.
    Because he had to sound that way, I understood. Because, of course, there wasn’t any counter-argument to be made. There was no pretending that I had actually done anything to bring about this situation. There was no matching tally of my behaviour that could be trotted out to explain away what Carolyn had done. There was only my reaction to Carolyn’s actions.
    I wasn’t being friendly enough. I wasn’t pretending everything was okay. I was making a difficult situation worse. I wasn’t
helping
anything.
    They didn’t like my
reactions
.
    ‘The fact is, Sarah,’ Mom said, in what was, for her, an attempt at a calm and reasonable tone, ‘marriages end. Look at your father and me. We’ve certainly had our troubles. But we did what we had to do, quietly, and we moved on. What’s the benefit of sharing your personal problems with the whole wide world?’
    I could feel the curve of my lips, and I knew it was no smile.
    ‘I haven’t put up a billboard up in the middle of town saying
Tim is a cheating bastard and my sister is a whore
,’ I pointed out acidly, ignoring the protesting noise Dad made at, I could only assume, my word choices. However appropriate they might have been, description-wise. ‘Though the fact that the two of them have been shacked up in the B&B right smack in the middle of town kind of accomplishes the same thing, don’t you think?’
    My mother shifted in her chair. My father rubbed his hand over his beard as if it would tell him what to say.
    ‘However unfortunate the situation might be, Carolyn is our daughter, and she’s having our grandchild,’ Dad said, with a tone in his voice that I didn’t understand. Was that sorrow that it had come to this? Or was