Chapter 8: Lessons in Legacy (and Losing It)

On weekends, Anna would visit.

I’d hear Adam’s truck rumbling up the drive and feel something in my chest unclench — some small part of me that had been holding its breath all week finally allowed to exhale.

Anna didn’t tiptoe around Father’s moods or Mother’s coldness. She walked into Whitmore’s Rest like she still lived there, like she had every right to be exactly as loud and present and alive as she wanted. She’d kiss Nana on the cheek, ignore Grandpapa’s disapproving looks, and find me wherever I was hiding.

“There’s my favorite nephew,” she’d say, even though I was her only nephew.

She’d ruffle my hair — casually, affectionately, the kind of touch that didn’t flinch or calculate or brace for impact. Her fingers would brush against my temple, checking for new bruises with a touch so light I almost didn’t notice.

But I did notice.

She always checked.

Then she’d launch into some story designed to pull me out of whatever hole I’d climbed into that week. Construction disasters. Ridiculous client requests. The time someone asked them to build a chicken coop shaped like the Taj Mahal and Adam had actually drawn up the plans before Anna told him to stop encouraging crazy.

And Zoe — Zoe would toddle after me from the moment they arrived.

Two years old now, all chubby legs and determined expression. Where I went, she went. If I sat under the magnolia tree, she’d plop down next to me, dirt and grass stains be damned. If I walked to the creek, she’d follow, stumbling over roots and rocks but refusing to be left behind.

“She’s your shadow,” Anna would say, grinning. “Better get used to it.”

I didn’t mind.

Zoe didn’t need me to perform. Didn’t need me to be anything other than present. She’d hand me rocks she thought were interesting. She’d point at birds and wait for me to name them. She’d curl up against my side when she got tired and fall asleep with her hand fisted in my shirt.

With Zoe, I didn’t have to fold.

I could just be.

For a few hours every weekend, I could just be.

One Saturday in late spring, Anna brought Zoe to the creek and then left us there.

Not abandoned-left. Just ... gave us space.

“I’m going to help Nana with something in the garden,” she said, ruffling my hair. “You two good here for a bit?”

I nodded.

Zoe was already crouched by the water’s edge, poking at something in the mud with a stick.

Anna walked back toward the house, and for the first time, it was just the two of us.

Zoe was almost three. Still unsteady on her feet, still learning which words went with which things, but fiercely determined about everything she did. She’d found a smooth gray stone and was trying to skip it the way she’d seen me do, but her throws just plopped straight down into the water.

“Like this,” I said, demonstrating. Wrist flick, low angle, stone bouncing twice before sinking.

She tried again. Plop.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s hard.”

She handed me the stone. “You.”

I skipped it for her. Three bounces.

She clapped, delighted, then immediately started searching for another one.

We did this for a while. Her finding stones, me skipping them, her watching with that serious concentration she had, like she was studying for a test.

Then she found a rock that wasn’t smooth at all — rough, dark, kind of ugly — and held it up to me.

“This one.”

“That one won’t skip,” I said gently. “It’s not flat enough.”

She looked at it. Looked at me. Held it out again, insistent.

“This one.”

So I took it.

I threw it the way I’d throw any other stone, knowing it wouldn’t work, already preparing to explain why.

It sank immediately.

Zoe stared at the spot where it disappeared, her face scrunched up in thought.

Then she turned to me and said, very seriously: “It’s sleeping.”

I blinked. “What?”

“The rock. It’s sleeping. In the water.”

She said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Like of course that’s what rocks did when they didn’t skip. They went to sleep.

I don’t know why it hit me the way it did.

Maybe because she wasn’t upset that it sank.

Maybe because she’d just ... decided it was supposed to do that, and made it okay.

Maybe because in that moment, I realized she didn’t need me to be perfect. She didn’t need me to skip every stone or explain every failure or perform some impossible standard.

She just needed me to be there. To try. To throw her ugly rock even when I knew it wouldn’t work.

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “It’s sleeping.”

She nodded, satisfied, and went back to searching for more stones.

After a while, she got tired and climbed into my lap, settling against my chest like it was the most natural thing in the world. Her hair smelled like the no-tears shampoo Anna used, and her hands were muddy, and she was getting dirt all over my shirt.

I didn’t care.

“Gabriel?” she said, her voice small and sleepy.

“Yeah?”

“You’re my favorite.”

Not “you’re nice” or “I like you” or any of the things kids usually say.

Just: you’re my favorite.

Like I’d won something I hadn’t known I was competing for.

“You’re my favorite too, Zoe,” I whispered.

She was asleep before I finished the sentence, her little fist curled in my shirt, her breathing slow and even.

I sat there under the sycamore tree, holding her, watching the creek flow past, and felt something settle in my chest.

Something that felt almost like peace.

Zoe didn’t need me to be the boy Grandpapa wanted or the son Father demanded or the brother Mother expected.

She just needed me to be Gabriel.

And for the first time in my life, that felt like enough.

The farm became my refuge in the cracks between all that.

Not the working parts — Father’s realm — but the edges. The creek that cut along the back of the property, shallow and clear, with a massive sycamore tree on the bank. I’d sit under that tree for hours, watching the water, making up stories in my head. Adventures where I was someone else — someone brave, someone strong, someone who didn’t flinch when his father came home.

Sometimes Nana would find me there. She’d sit next to me without speaking, her arm around my shoulders, and we’d just exist together in silence. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t offer platitudes.

She just held me while I tried to hold myself together.

On weekends when Anna visited, she’d find me there too. Sometimes she’d bring Zoe, and we’d all sit by the creek — me skipping stones, Zoe trying to copy me and mostly just throwing rocks in the water, Anna smoking cigarettes she thought Nana didn’t know about.

“You know,” Anna said once, lying back on the grass with her eyes closed, “I have some good memories of this place.”

I looked at her, surprised.

She grinned without opening her eyes. “The lake. Where Grandpapa found me and Adam. Best afternoon of my life, even with the screaming match that followed.”

Zoe giggled, not understanding but delighted by her mother’s tone.

I tried to imagine Aunt Anna at seventeen, caught with Adam, defiant in the face of Grandfather’s fury. It made the creek feel less lonely. Like rebellion had happened here before and survived.

Those were the good days.

Meanwhile, Kitty grew.

She was everything I wasn’t: loud, fearless, wild. She could laugh too loud at church and be called spirited. She could track mud through the house and be called energetic. She could pick her nose at the dinner table and be called a character.

When she cried, people comforted her.

When I cried, I got hit.

Father was tender with her — gentle in ways I’d never seen. Mother actually smiled around her, something warm and real that I’d spent years failing to earn.

“A fine Whitmore girl,” Grandpapa would say, bouncing her on his knee.

And I would watch from the edges of rooms, loving her and resenting her in equal measure, understanding even then that the inequity wasn’t her fault but unable to stop the bitter seed growing in my chest.

Kitty would play with Zoe sometimes — they were only a month apart, after all — but there was already a difference. Kitty commanded attention. Zoe gave it. Kitty demanded toys. Zoe shared hers. When Kitty cried, adults came running. When Zoe fell and scraped her knee, she’d look around for me.

I learned early that Zoe was safe. She didn’t know how to weaponize tears. She didn’t understand the theater of it. She just ... was.

At first, Kitty learned the way all children learn: cause and effect.

Crying got her things. Demanding got results. Gabriel giving in meant she won.

She was three years old. She was doing what any child would do when every tantrum was rewarded, every demand met, every tear treated like a tragedy that required immediate resolution.

Our parents created the pattern. Then blamed me when she followed it.

She wanted my toys. I gave them to her. She’d break them immediately — not always on purpose, just through the careless destruction of a toddler who’d never been told “no.”

She wanted to control the TV. If I was watching something, she’d cry until someone changed the channel. I learned to just not watch TV.

She wanted candy, gifts, attention. I learned to surrender before the fight started, because fighting meant my parents would intervene, and intervention meant I’d be blamed.

By the time she was six, something had shifted.

The tears came faster now. More strategically. She’d learned which expressions worked on which adults, which volume got the quickest response. She knew I’d give in to avoid punishment.

But I don’t think she understood — not really — what happened to me after.

I remember the day I understood the full extent of it.

We were in the playroom — a whole space devoted to our things because Whitmores didn’t put their children’s things in bedrooms like common people. She wanted a toy firetruck that Aunt Anna had given me for Christmas. A collectible, metal and painted beautifully, one of my favorite things.

“I want to play with it,” she said.

“You can play with something else,” I said, trying to be diplomatic. “This one’s special.”

She reached for it anyway. I pulled it back.

We stared at each other.

Then she smiled. This small, knowing smile that made my stomach drop.

And then she started crying.

Not the building-up kind of cry. Instant. Loud. Performative.

I lunged forward, not to hurt her but to stop her — to cover her mouth, to make her stop before—

Too late.

Mother appeared in the doorway, and the scene was already written: Gabriel looming over Kitty, Kitty crying, the truck on the floor between us with a wheel broken off.

I don’t remember what Mother said. I remember the look on her face — vindication, like she’d always known I was the problem and here was proof.

Father’s belt found me in the barn that afternoon.

Three days later, Kitty knocked on my bedroom door. She was holding the broken truck.

She didn’t say anything. Just walked in, set it on my desk, and curled up next to me on the bed.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

But she was smiling.

Not maliciously. Not cruelly. Just ... pleased with herself. Like she’d figured out a puzzle and was proud of solving it.

She was six years old. A child. A victim of parents who’d taught her that the world revolved around her wants and that I existed to provide them.

How could I hate her for that?

It should have made me hate her. And part of me did — that bitter seed growing roots, spreading.

But I couldn’t sustain it. Because she was also this:

A thunderstorm when she was six. The kind of Georgia storm that shakes the windows and makes the lights flicker. I woke to my door opening and Kitty climbing into my bed, her small body trembling.

“I’m scared,” she whispered.

I put my arm around her and started singing — those same mangled Irish lullabies, gibberish words in a rhythm I still thought was real.

She fell asleep against my chest, and I stayed awake the whole night, holding her, loving her with a fierceness that overwhelmed the resentment.

She was my little sister. She was the only person in that house besides Nana who touched me without it hurting.

How could I hate her?

It became a pattern. Every thunderstorm, every nightmare, she’d appear at my door and crawl into my bed. My parents didn’t know — or if they knew, they didn’t care enough to stop it.

And I’d hold her and sing to her and feel that complicated knot of love and resentment and protectiveness tighten in my chest until I couldn’t breathe.

You know how Christmas is supposed to be a joyful time for children? All that magic and wonder and waking up early to see what Santa brought?

For me, Christmas was a time of reckoning.

My father had spent my entire childhood drilling into me that I was on the naughty list. Every misbehavior, every punishment, every disappointed look was catalogued as evidence that Santa knew what I really was. And in Brazil, where my father grew up, naughty children didn’t just get coal in their stockings.

They got vara de marmelo—a birch rod. And the especially naughty ones got to test it on Christmas Day.

“My father did this to me every Christmas I misbehaved,” he’d told me once, matter-of-fact. “It kept me in line. Made me a man.”

Guess which category I fell into.

So December was always heavy with dread. While other kids counted down with excitement, I counted down with the sick certainty of what was coming.

Christmas morning started early.

Kitty woke the whole house at six AM, shrieking about Santa, and came barreling into my room to drag me downstairs. Zoe appeared in my doorway seconds later, still in her pajamas with snowflakes on them, rubbing her eyes.

“Gabriel?” she said quietly. “Can I stay with you?”

“Always,” I said, taking her hand.

The three of us went downstairs together—Kitty running ahead, Zoe holding tight to my hand, me trying not to look at the pile of presents under the tree and wonder which ones had my name on them.

The tree was enormous, as always. Grandpapa insisted on cutting one from the property every year, and it took up half the living room. Nana had decorated it the week before, humming those Irish airs while she worked, and it was covered in ornaments that were older than my parents.