Chapter 10: The Sisters Choose a Side

Rebecca called at nine-fifteen that night.

Eli stared at her name on the screen for three full rings before answering. He sat on the edge of the air mattress in Samir’s living room, composition notebook open across his knees, the photographs from the basement still pulled up on his phone. He’d been cataloging them again, trying to build some kind of timeline that made sense. The call interrupted that.

He answered.

“I saw you today,” Rebecca said. No preamble, no hey, just that.

“I know,” he said. “I saw you too.”

A pause. “You didn’t come to the car.”

“No.”

Another pause, longer. He could hear her breathing—not upset, exactly, but effortful, the way someone breathes when they’ve rehearsed something and the moment has arrived and the rehearsal is suddenly insufficient.

“Claire and I want to meet with you,” she said. “Not at the house. Somewhere else.”

“Why?”

“Because we need to talk to you and it needs to be somewhere that isn’t—somewhere that isn’t theirs.” A beat. “I know you don’t have any reason to trust us right now. I know that. But we want to explain some things, and I think you deserve to hear them, and I don’t want to do it over the phone.”

He looked at the photos on his phone. His name in the noncompliance folder. The date circled on the index card in his mother’s handwriting.

“Where?” he said.

They settled on the diner on Fremont, the one open until midnight on weekdays with booths in the back far enough from the counter to give you privacy. Samir drove him, parked in the lot, and stared at the diner through the windshield for a moment.

“You want me in there?” he said.

“No,” Eli said. “But don’t go anywhere.”

“I’ll get coffee at the counter,” Samir said. “Thirty feet away.”

Eli nodded and got out of the car.

Claire and Rebecca were already in the back booth when he walked in—Claire on the left, Rebecca on the right, an empty space between them and two untouched cups of coffee on the table. They looked up as the door chimed. Claire’s eyes were red and swollen, though she’d clearly tried to hide it. Rebecca hadn’t cried yet and seemed determined not to, which made her look wound tight, her expression carefully blank, her jaw set in that way it got when she was holding something back.

He slid into the booth across from them without taking off his jacket.

For a moment, no one spoke. The diner hummed quietly around them—a couple at the counter, a waitress refilling a coffee pot, something country drifting from a speaker overhead. Through the front window, he could see Samir’s car in the lot.

“You want coffee?” Claire asked.

“Sure.”

She flagged down the waitress. They waited in silence while his cup was filled. The waitress asked if they needed anything else. Claire said no thank you. The waitress left.

Eli studied his sisters across the table.

He’d known these people his whole life. He’d grown up in bedrooms down the hall from them, shared a bathroom with them until Claire left for college, eaten breakfast across the table from them every morning. He knew Claire’s habit of folding her napkin into increasingly small squares when she was nervous—which she was doing now. He knew the way Rebecca’s voice went flat right before she said something painfully honest—which it was doing now as she finally started talking.

“I owe you an explanation,” Rebecca said. “Both of us do. But I want to go first.”

“Okay.”

“I knew,” she said. “I want to say that clearly before anything else. I knew what was going to happen on your birthday. Not—I didn’t know the exact date they’d settled on, and I didn’t know about the vote until after, but I knew you were going to be told to leave. I’d known for a while.”

He held her gaze. She held his.

“And you didn’t call me.”

“No.”

“You didn’t warn me.”

“No.”

“You let it happen.”

“Yes,” she said. One word, flat and undecorated, and whatever he’d been bracing for — a justification, an explanation, something to soften the blow — didn’t come. Just that single word sitting between them on the table.

He turned his cup in his hands. “Okay,” he said. “Keep going.”

She looked down for a second, then back up. “What I need you to understand — and I’m not saying this to excuse anything, I just want you to have the whole picture — is what it’s like to grow up in this family and not know that what you’re growing up in is wrong. Because we didn’t know that. Not as kids. Not for a long time.” She glanced at Claire, who gave a small, almost imperceptible nod — not encouraging, just confirming. “It’s not that they sat us down and told us terrible things when we were little. It’s slower than that. There’s a language the family uses and you learn it the same way you learn any language, just from being around it. The word gathering. The phrase the full life of the family. The symbol.”

“I know the symbol,” Eli said.

“They had us trace it when we were little,” Rebecca said. “Like a drawing lesson. Mom showed us how to draw the loop and the three lines and said it was the family mark, that it was about belonging, that we were lucky to belong to something so old.” She paused. “That’s all it was for years. Just the mark. Just the language. Just the sense that the family had something special and private that wasn’t for outsiders to know about, and that felt normal. Every family has things like that.”

“And then you turned eighteen,” Eli said.

“And then I turned eighteen,” she confirmed.

He waited.

She picked up her coffee cup and set it down without drinking. “There’s a night,” she said. “A specific night. It’s framed as a welcome — you’re an adult now, you’re being welcomed into the full life of the family.” She paused. “Aunt Lydia runs it. She’s run it for as long as anyone in our generation can remember.”