The name landed in the middle of my chest and sat there. I didn’t know an Elena.
“She was a burden, Mom,” Clara hissed. “Showing up at my door with twin toddlers, begging me to take them for ‘just a few months’ while she did her treatment. Like I was running a daycare.”
I froze.
“And then the accident,” Clara went on, almost cheerfully. “Her car went into the river, and with no corpse to prove otherwise, it was easy to say she had run off. Widowed, sick, with two children she could barely manage, my sister fit the story people were willing to believe. Even Josh believed it at first.”
“Clara, please.”
“What was I supposed to do, Mom? Tell the boys their mother was dying in hospice the whole time? Tell them she was gone before the cancer even finished with her? Hand over the money she left? That money paid for this house, for my car, for the life I deserved after years of being the invisible sister.”
