Chapter 17 — Brigitte Knew

My sister, it turned out, had been old enough.

Not old enough to have planned it — she had been a child when it happened, as I had.

But old enough, in the years since, to have learned the truth and kept it.

Old enough to have carried food out to that shed.

Old enough to grow cruel inside the secret, to look at me across a lifetime of holidays knowing our father was alive underground and saying nothing, because the secret had made her our mother’s accomplice and our mother’s accomplice was the only kind of daughter our mother loved.