THAT SAME EVENING, Leda was sprawled on her bed, idly flicking through the feeds on her contacts, when a flicker from her mom appeared. It was addressed to Leda and her dad. I’m stuck at work, don’t wait for me for dinner!
Leda’s mom, a corporate lawyer, had been working a lot of weekends recently. With Leda’s older brother, Jamie, away at college this year, that meant that Leda and her dad were often home alone—and ever since Eris’s death, they hadn’t been on the best of terms. They’d gotten in the habit of both claiming to have “a lot to do” and wolfing down their food as quickly as they could before fleeing in opposite directions.
It saddened Leda. There had been a time, not long ago, when she felt incredibly close with her dad—when on nights like this, he would have looked at her with a guilty smile and asked if she wanted to go to their favorite Italian place around the corner, instead of staying at home. They would linger over double dessert, exchanging stories from the day, strategizing whatever problem was bothering Leda.
In the wake of Eris’s death, Leda hadn’t known how to face her dad. Their relationship had become strained, and they drifted ever further apart. Now they met and spoke with the impersonal, courteous disinterest of strangers passing in the street.
But this time, Leda wasn’t going to ignore her mom’s message the way she always did.
She may not have figured out the truth in time to repair her relationship with Eris, but it wasn’t too late for Leda and her dad.
She headed down the hall to his home office and paused at the door. A chorus of voices talked over one another on the other side; he must be on a vid-conference. She tapped at the door anyway.
“Leda?” she heard her dad say, breaking off from his call. “Come in.”
Matt Cole’s office was delightfully cozy, all bold colors and deep wood furniture. A glazed redwood trunk, hovering in the air in suspension, served as the desk. Before the antique étagère flickered a holoscreen, squared off into eight boxes, each containing the disembodied head of someone else on the vid-call. Leda wondered which of them were in Asia, or Europe, or South America.
“I’ll need to see a revised deck by tomorrow morning. Thanks so much, everyone,” her dad concluded and sliced horizontally into the air to end the conference call. “Hey, Leda,” he said, turning hesitantly toward her. “I just have a few more things to wrap up before dinner.”
“Actually, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
Leda glanced at the sleek black chair before the desk but dismissed it as too businesslike, the type of place she would have sat if she were one of her dad’s clients. Instead she headed to the pair of armchairs nestled in one corner of the office.
Her dad followed with cautious footsteps. Leda took a seat, curling her bare feet into the heated carpet and reached for the framed instaphoto on the nearby table. It was her mom’s wedding portrait.
Ilara looked incredible in her wedding gown, a minimalist sheath of ivory silk crepe. Its neckline swooped down in a dramatic V, but she could pull it off. She was as thin and small-chested as Leda was. She looked so happy in this photo, Leda thought, her eyes dancing with a light, almost playful joy.
“What is it, Leda?”
She set the photo back down, her heart hammering in her chest. She knew this was the right thing to do, yet she was still afraid. Once she said these words, she could never un-say them.
“I want to talk about Eris. I know that she was my half sister.”
Her dad seemed utterly lost for words. His eyes had drifted from Leda to the image of her mom, still smiling blithe and unaware in the hammered pewter frame.
“Oh, Leda,” he said at last. “I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”
But you did, Leda thought, though it seemed unnecessarily cruel to say. You hurt all of us. That was always how it happened, wasn’t it? No one ever set out to hurt the people they loved, but they ended up doing it all the same.
“How did you find out?” he asked.
Leda remembered lying on the sand in Dubai, shivering and dizzy; Mariel’s face etched eerily against the darkness as she announced that Eris had been Leda’s sister. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “But it wasn’t until after Eris died. I wish I had known earlier. It would have . . . changed things, between us.”
Her dad leaned forward, his hands gripped tightly around his knees. “I didn’t know for years, Leda. I had only just found out; Eris’s mom told me a few months before Eris died.” He spoke with a rapid urgency, as if it were critical that Leda believe him in this.
“You should have told me, before—” Before I misjudged things and pushed Eris away, too hard. Before I lost my chance to actually get to know her—as a sister.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, helplessly. Leda saw the grief in his eyes. It was real.
Her throat felt swollen. “I miss her,” Leda said quietly. “Or at least, I miss the chance with her I never had. I wish I could remember something more personal than her smile, but I don’t have much else. So I try to concentrate on that. Eris smiled all the time, not fake smiling the way most people do, but a real smile.”
Leda lifted her eyes to her dad. He was very still and quiet. “Or the way she used to dance. Eris was a terrible dancer, you know, all arms and elbows—a complete klutz, with no rhythm. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t, because it was Eris. When she was on the dance floor, no one could look away.”
Her dad’s face was ashen, his eyes gleaming with unshed tears.
“I hold on to these memories,” Leda forced herself to continue. “The easy, superficial ones, because those are all I have. That, and the memory of how she died.”
“Leda,” her dad said brokenly, throwing his arms open; and Leda moved forward into the hug. They stayed like that for a while in a silence that was thick with regret. Leda felt her dad’s tears, which startled her; she wasn’t sure if she had ever seen her father cry. It struck something deep within her.
She let him cry like that, his tears soaking her sweater, feeling as if she had become the parent, as if she were the one taking care of him. A strange catch released in her chest. At least they were no longer pretending to be okay when they weren’t.
“Does your mother know?” her father asked at last.
“I haven’t told her, if that’s what you mean. It isn’t my secret to tell.” Leda looked piercingly into her dad’s eyes. “I think you should, though.”
“Why? It will just hurt your mom, and it won’t change anything. Eris is gone. And Caroline and I—we were over a long time ago,” he hurried to say, naming Eris’s mom.
Leda understood the impulse. It was devastating, showing the worst parts of yourself to the people you cared about. Knowing that they would never look at you the same again. And yet—“Doesn’t it weigh on you, keeping a secret like that?”
“There are times, Leda, when the truth can do more harm than good. When sharing a secret is much more selfish than keeping it,” her dad insisted. “I know it’s not fair to put you in the middle like this, and I’m sorry. Someday, when you do something you wish you could undo—something you regret, something that changes you forever—you’ll understand what I mean.”
Leda knew exactly what her father meant, far more than he could ever guess.