The Substitute Daughter They Chose Over Me Chapter 04

The Substitute Daughter They Chose Over Me Chapter 04 The Apology Trip
My father called on a Wednesday. I was in the kitchen when it happened, standing at the counter with a glass of water I didn’t need, just standing there the way I had been doing a lot lately, occupying space without any real purpose to it. The phone lit up and his name sat on the screen and I looked at it for three full rings before I picked up. “Claire.” His voice was the same as it had always been. Measured. Authoritative. The voice of a man who had never once in his life questioned whether the room wanted to hear him. “How are you feeling?” “Better,” I said. “Good. Good.” A pause that felt rehearsed. “Your mother and I have been talking. We feel terrible about your anniversary. About everything. We’d like to make it up to you.” I waited. “A trip,” he said. “The mountain house. Just the family. A few days away, fresh air, some time to decompress. We thought it might help you heal.” Help me heal. I pressed my back against the counter and looked at the smoke detector above the dining table and thought about all the conversations it had swallowed and sent somewhere I couldn’t see. “That sounds lovely,” I said. The mountain house was a four hour drive from the city, a glass and timber structure perched above a valley with views my father had paid an architect a great deal of money to frame perfectly. I had spent childhood summers there. I knew every room, every trail, the specific way the wind came off the ridge in the late afternoon and made the trees sound like they were breathing. We drove up on a Thursday. Daniel and I in one car, my parents and Thomas in the other. The drive was the same as the kitchen had been, the same as every room in our house had been since I came home from the hospital. Politely airless. Daniel drove and I watched the city dissolve into highway and then into hills and I thought about Owen’s message on my phone, the one I had not yet answered, and I thought about the box behind Daniel’s winter coats, and I thought, one more time. Just let me look at them one more time. The first day was careful and surface-level in the way that family apologies always were. My mother made elaborate meals. My father poured good wine and told stories from the early days of the company, the ones he always told when he wanted everyone to remember who he was. Thomas was attentive in the slightly guilty way of someone who knew more than he was saying. Daniel stayed close to me in public and disappeared into his phone whenever the room allowed it. Nobody mentioned the hospital. Nobody mentioned the press conference. Nobody said Vivian’s name. I smiled at the right moments. I laughed at my father’s stories. I was easy and warm and entirely unremarkable, the way I had learned to be in rooms where being remarkable cost too much. Then Vivian arrived on the second day. She came in the late morning with a weekend bag and a smile that assumed its own welcome, the way she always did, moving through the front door like a woman returning to something that belonged to her. My father stood up from his chair when he saw her. Actually stood up. “You made it,” he said, and hugged her. I watched him hug her from across the room. I picked up my coffee cup and looked out the window at the valley and breathed through my nose slowly, evenly. “I hope it’s okay,” Vivian said, to the room, but she was looking at me when she said it. Her eyes were warm and her smile was perfect and underneath both of those things was something that wasn’t either of them. “I just thought, the family should be together.” “Of course it’s okay,” my mother said. Of course it was. She found me alone on the second afternoon. I had taken the trail along the ridge above the ravine, the one I had walked a hundred times as a child, narrow and exposed on one side with the drop falling away into trees below. I needed an hour away from the performance. Smiling. The wine. My father’s hand on Vivian’s shoulder at dinner the night before, the easy proprietary warmth of it, while his eyes slid past me like I was part of the furniture. I was standing at the edge, looking out at the valley, when I heard her behind me. “Beautiful view,” Vivian said. I didn’t turn around. “It is.” She came to stand beside me. Close enough that I could smell her perfume, something expensive and soft, the kind my mother had started complimenting lately. She looked out at the valley with the same expression she put on for photographs, serene and slightly elevated, like a woman who had been placed there for effect. “You should think about selling your share of the company,” she said conversationally. “It would be cleaner. For everyone.” “Would it?” “You were never really suited for it, Claire. You know that. You’re too, I don’t know.” She tilted her head. “Soft. It’s not an insult. It’s just true.” I looked at the valley. The trees far below. The specific quality of the silence up here, how it was never actually silent, just layered with wind and birds and the distant sound of the river at the bottom of the ravine. “I heard you cry last month,” she said. “At the house. Through the guest room wall. You didn’t know I was there.” A pause. “It was a lot.” I turned to look at her then. I couldn’t help it. She was watching me with something that might have looked like sympathy to anyone who didn’t know what to look for. Her eyes were perfectly steady. Her mouth was soft. And underneath all of it, sitting in her expression the way a splinter sits under skin, was the thing she was actually feeling. She was enjoying this. “I think you should go back inside,” I said. “I think you should stop pretending this is something you can come back from.” Her voice didn’t change. Still conversational. Still warm. Like we were discussing something mild and logistical. “Daniel’s done. Your father’s done. Even Thomas, Claire. He told me last week he doesn’t know how to talk to you anymore. You’ve lost all of them. And I know you know that.” She stepped slightly closer. “So what exactly are you still doing here?” “Vivian.” “What?” I looked at her. At the immaculate performance of her. The years of it, the careful years, the patience it must have taken to dismantle everything I had one piece at a time while smiling at Sunday dinners. “Nothing,” I said. “I’m not going to do this with you.” I turned to walk back up the trail. Her hand caught my arm. I pulled away and in the turning and the pulling the edge of the path came up faster than either of us expected and the ground was damp from the morning and her grip tightened instead of releasing and then there was no ground and there was only air and the sound of both of us and the trees rising up fast below. We were falling.