Ryan looked confused. "What?" "Does Lily know you don't want to be with her?" "Yes." Lily stared at the table.
Ava waited. Finally Lily said, "He told me." "When?" "After I told him I was pregnant." Ava's eyes moved slowly back to Ryan.
"So until three weeks ago, she didn't know." "We weren't together," he said. "You were speaking to her privately, hiding messages from me, and sharing a secret sexual history. You may not have called it a relationship, but you kept enough of one alive that she did not know what she was to you." Ryan's jaw tightened.
"That's not accurate." Lily gave a short, broken laugh. Ava looked at her. "What?" Lily shook her head.
"Nothing." "No. We're done with nothing." Ryan said quietly, "Lily." Ava's anger snapped toward him.
"Do not manage her answer." Lily drew a shaking breath. "I thought he might choose me if you found out." The words seemed to embarrass her more than anything else she had confessed. She stared down at her clasped hands, cheeks flushed, shoulders pulled inward.
Ryan's expression became a mixture of guilt and frustration. Ava did not speak for several seconds. She had imagined many possible motives for her sister over the last hour: loneliness, envy, recklessness, resentment. She had not been prepared for the humiliating simplicity of hope. "You thought my husband might choose you."
Lily's voice was almost inaudible. "For a while." "So when you came here for Sunday breakfast, when you sat on my couch and asked me how work was, when you borrowed my clothes, when you hugged me goodbye, part of you was waiting to see whether my husband might leave me for you." "It wasn't like that every minute." "How many minutes does it need to be like that before it counts?"
Lily began crying again. Ryan stepped away from the table and leaned one hand on the back of his chair. "Ava, she was confused." "She's twenty-three, not thirteen." "I know."
"Do you? Because both of you keep talking about her heartbreak like it removed her ability to understand marriage." Lily shook her head. "I'm not asking you to forgive me." "Good."
The answer was immediate enough to make Lily flinch. Ava continued, quieter now. "Because I don't know whether I ever can." That landed differently from anger. Lily's face went still, and Ava watched the possibility of permanent loss finally become real to her sister.
Until that moment, perhaps Lily had imagined consequences as screaming, slammed doors, a divorce, months of silence. But sisters who had survived childhood together carried a hidden assumption that the relationship itself was indestructible. Ava no longer shared that assumption. "You're my sister," Lily whispered. Ava's eyes filled for the first time, but she blinked the tears back.
"And you're mine. That's exactly why this hurts the way it does." Lily pressed a fist to her mouth. Ava looked at Ryan. "And you knew what she meant to me."
"Yes." "You heard all the stories. You watched me drop everything when she needed me. You were there when I drove to Boston because Caleb hadn't come home and she was having a panic attack." Ryan nodded, face pale.
"You were the one who told me to bring her here." "I remember." "You said she needed to feel safe." Ryan closed his eyes. Ava's voice cracked.