Family, Eleanor thought, was not the people you chose. It was the people you couldn’t stop being related to, no matter how hard you tried. And the only way through the inheritance of shadows was to sit together in the dark, and listen.
A strange, hollow relief bloomed in Eleanor’s chest. She hated it. She crushed it immediately. Their father, Arthur, had been dying for three years—a slow, cruel unraveling of the mind that had turned a brilliant, tyrannical surgeon into a weeping stranger who sometimes forgot how to use a fork. She had mourned him already, piece by piece. But mourning and death were not the same thing. incest experience forum
Julia looked at the hand. Then she looked at Eleanor’s face—really looked, as if searching for a ghost. “You have his hands,” she said quietly. “The surgeon’s hands. Long fingers.” Family, Eleanor thought, was not the people you chose
“She had a right to know her father died.” Leo stood up. He was taller than both of them, but he still looked like the scared kid who used to hide in the closet during the shouting matches. “You two have been so busy competing for his approval that you forgot he was a person. A flawed, cruel, broken person. But he was still our father. And she’s still our blood.” A strange, hollow relief bloomed in Eleanor’s chest
“Of course I came.” Eleanor set down her bag. “Where’s the lawyer meeting?”
“Read the journal,” Marianne said.