Blair laughed when she drove the silver dessert cart into my eight-month-pregnant stomach.
The corner of it hit just below my ribs and knocked me backward into the granite island in my parents’ dining room. Crystal rattled. Forks jumped on their linen napkins. A dessert plate slid off the tray and shattered at my feet, spraying lemon filling across the floor.
For one suspended second, I could not breathe.
Then the pain arrived.
It came in bright, white waves that swallowed everything else. I bent over my belly on instinct, both arms wrapped around it, and felt a warm trickle down the inside of my thigh.
My first thought was not about my bones, or the island edge digging into my spine, or the fact that Blair had just rammed a loaded cart into a woman who was thirty-four weeks pregnant.
My first thought was simple and animal.
Please move, baby.
Please.
‘I wanted to see if he’d kick back,’ Blair said.
She sounded almost cheerful.
She was twenty-seven years old and dressed for Sunday supper in a pale blue silk dress my mother had bought her two days earlier. Her dark hair was tied with a ribbon. Her lipstick was perfect. If a stranger had walked in at that moment, they would have thought she was the delicate one.
My father set his wineglass down with a click of annoyance. ‘Nora, stop it. You’re upsetting your sister.’
My mother didn’t move toward me. She hurried to Blair instead and checked the inside of her wrist where the cart handle had bounced.
‘Sweetheart, did she grab you?’ she asked.
Then she looked at me with that polished, frozen smile she reserved for moments when she wanted to sound civilized while being merciless.
‘Get off the floor,’ she said. ‘You are not the first woman to be pregnant.’
Another cramp tore through me. Harder this time. Lower.
‘Mom,’ I whispered.
She lifted one shoulder. ‘Honestly, Nora. You always did have a flair for timing.’
My father stepped around me, careful not to dirty his loafers in the lemon curd. ‘If Reed asks, you tripped. I’m not indulging one of your scenes in front of Blair.’
That was the terrible thing.
If he had said it to someone else, they might have called it monstrous. To me, it was familiar.
I had grown up in the shadow of Blair’s wants. Blair’s sensitivities. Blair’s tears. Blair’s strange little acts of cruelty that my parents renamed innocence before anyone could challenge them.
When she cut my prom dress straps at seventeen, my mother said she had been feeling left out.
When she flushed my college acceptance letter because she didn’t want me moving away, my father said I should have hidden important papers better.
When she slapped me across the mouth the night I announced my engagement, my parents called it an episode and asked me not to ruin dinner.
Blair learned early that if she looked confused afterward, they would do the rest.
I learned early that my pain was negotiable.
The room tipped sideways.
I remember gripping the cabinet pull until my fingers slipped. I remember the chandelier blurring into stars. I remember Blair smiling over my shoulder, not with guilt, not with fear, but with fascination.
Then the floor rose up
