Chapter Seventeen
Sterling
ONE WEEK AFTER OSGOOD disqualifies Casey as a donor, Brittany arrives for dinner on Thursday, and the first thing she does is search the house for Casey.
Once she finds her, she avoids looking directly at her.
Before that, she checks the foyer, the hallway, and the kitchen doorway, like a woman checking an exit route before committing to a room.
She finds Casey at the kitchen island, cutting Sienna’s chicken before carrying the plate to the dining room.
Sienna is explaining to Bart why chicken is acceptable but not the green things, except peas, because peas are the only green thing that has earned Sienna’s trust. Casey listens to this with the patience of a woman who has heard the pea argument several hundred times and still finds it reasonable.
“Brittany,” Casey says. She doesn’t look up from the chicken.
“Casey.” Brittany’s voice is thin. She stands near the counter as though she hasn’t decided whether to stay. She doesn’t look at Casey. She hasn’t looked at Casey since she walked in. When Sienna asks who the lady is, Brittany flinches.
“That’s Brittany,” Casey says, still cutting chicken. “She’s your dad’s sister.”
Brittany frowns when she doesn’t clarify she is Sienna’s aunt. “That makes me your aunt.”
Casey frowns but doesn’t dispute that.
“Oh,” Sienna says with casual indifference. She studies Brittany for a second. “Do you like elephants?”
“I...elephants? I...yes...” Brittany says. “I do.”
I frown at my sister, who has won awards in forensics club. She’s rarely stammering or at a loss for words.
“Good.” Sienna returns to explaining the pea rules to Bart. She has accepted Brittany into the category of people who like elephants, which, for Sienna, is reason enough to trust someone, and Brittany looks like she might cry.
I register this though I don’t know what it means.
My mother arrives twelve minutes after Brittany, which is deliberate.
Mother doesn’t arrive first. She arrives after everyone else has settled, because entering a room already in progress is a different kind of authority than being present when it fills.
I’ve watched her do this at charity events, board dinners, and family holidays.
The entrance is always timed, always composed, always calibrated to remind the room that she’s the person who sets the terms.
Except the night she was waiting in my penthouse living room with Brittany to let Casey know her affair was exposed.
She greets Brittany with a kiss near her cheek and greets me with a touch on the arm.
She greets Casey with a smile and Sienna with a long look that takes in the purple shirt, the bare feet, and the stuffed elephant on the counter.
She looks again at the bare feet with a frown but doesn’t comment.
“She’s looking better.” It sounds supportive but functions as an assessment.
“She’s the same,” Casey says without much inflection. “Counts are the same. She’s stable. She just had a long nap.”
Dinner is at the dining table because my mother insists on it.
Casey agrees without argument. The location costs her nothing, and whatever my mother intends to do with the opportunity, Casey looks prepared for it.
It strikes me that Casey chooses her battles carefully, strategically, and with complete certainty about what’s essential.
Five years ago, she decided it wasn’t worth battling with my mother over her opinions of Casey.
I didn’t think it was important either, but I wonder suddenly if I let too much slide.
Sienna sits between Casey and me. Bart sits on Sienna’s lap, which my mother notices without commenting on, though she frowns, so she’s probably saving a list of grievances she’ll air when the time is right.
We eat. The conversation is the conversation my mother conducts.
It’s controlled, pleasant, and touches nothing that matters.
“How is the transplant progressing?” Gretchen asks.
She directs the question at Casey, not me, which is either courtesy or strategy.
When did I start evaluating that scale? Sometime after their first meeting and the reunion five years later.
“Sterling’s donor workup is in progress,” Casey says. “Conditioning starts in approximately four weeks, pending cardiac clearance.”
“What is the prognosis?”
“Osgood is cautiously optimistic.” Casey is using her nurse’s voice. She’s relaying essential information, stripped of emotion.
“How is Sienna’s appetite?” Mother asks.
“Fine,” Casey says.
“Is she sleeping through the night?”
“Most nights.”
Gretchen asks the questions with clinical precision. “Perhaps she isn’t getting the right sleep environment. A strict bedtime routine—”
“She sleeps during the day and at night. She sleeps when she’s tired,” Casey says. “She’s four and sick. Some days, she sleeps more hours than she’s awake, so if her waking time is at two a.m., I’m going to savor every moment of it, not try to force her into someone else’s schedule.”
Sienna is eating her chicken in the pieces Casey cut.
She has separated the peas into a small fortress on the left side of her plate, organized by size.
Bart is on her lap, observing. Brittany is watching Sienna with an expression between fascination and grief, though I don’t know why Brittany would grieve for a niece she’s meeting for the first time unless she’s missing the four years of time Casey stole from all of us.
Sienna drops her fork. It clatters against the plate. She picks it up.
“Elbows off the table, sweetheart,” my mother says. She says everything warmly.
“Don’t,” Casey says.
One word. She doesn’t look up from her plate. She doesn’t raise her voice. She cuts a piece of chicken, puts it in her mouth, chews, swallows.
“I only meant that a child benefits from learning proper table manners early,” my mother says. “It’s really not—”
“She’s four. She can put her elbows wherever she wants and learn manners if...when she’s past the current hurdles.”
Casey ends the discussion with finality.
My mother redirects without changing expression.
She asks Brittany about her weekend plans, and my sister answers without looking up.
Mother frowns. “I don’t think you should spend time with that Carlisle boy.
Rumors are swirling his father is about to lose a major deal. ”
“It’s just a dinner date.”
Mother frowns. “Dinner with the wrong sort leads to all sorts of undesirable outcomes.”
“Yes, like marrying the nurse who saved your life in a crazy moment of impetuosity,” says Casey offhandedly, not quite joking, but certainly not with gravitas. “It can lead to a lifetime of regret.”
Across the table, Brittany flinches, though Casey wasn’t speaking to her.
I flinch too at the way Casey describes our decision to get married, and the dismissal of it all as a lingering regret.
I send my sister a sympathetic look, but she hastily looks away, pointedly from Casey’s direction.
I frown. Brittany hasn’t looked at Casey once during the meal.
She’s eaten half her food. She’s rearranged the other half into a pattern that looks deliberate but probably isn’t.
She doesn’t speak to Casey, and Casey doesn’t speak to her.
Casey, I understand. She’s resentful my sister exposed her affair.
Still, the distance between her and Casey has a quality I can’t name.
It isn’t hostility or ordinary awkwardness.
It looks like avoidance. Brittany is avoiding Casey.
Maybe she feels guilty for telling the truth, which started the events that led to us losing out on four years of Sienna’s life.
I make a note to pull her aside soon and reassure her I’d rather know the truth than live a lie.
My mother doesn’t avoid Casey. My mother engages Casey directly, tests her boundaries, and probes for weak points with the precision of a woman who has been navigating power dynamics since before I was born.
Mother’s approach to Casey is strategic.
Brittany’s approach is entirely different.
Brittany is twenty-seven years old and she’s sitting at a dinner table unable to look at the woman whose lie she uncovered, and I’m only now noticing that those are two very different behaviors.
Before I can think much more about it, Sienna looks up from her plate.
“Why are peas green?”
Casey smiles into her iced tea. “Uh-oh.”
I glance between them. “Uh-oh?”
“Answer at your own risk.”
“Because they contain chlorophyll.”
Sienna blinks.
I continue anyway.
“Plants use chlorophyll to capture energy from sunlight. It absorbs mostly red and blue wavelengths of light and reflects green wavelengths, which is why peas look green.”
She nods.
Encouraged, I keep going.
“That energy powers photosynthesis. The plant combines water from the ground with carbon dioxide from the air to produce glucose, which is basically plant food, and oxygen, which is fortunate for us because we happen to need it.”
Another serious nod.
“The chlorophyll is inside structures called chloroplasts. They’re found in the plant’s cells, and they’re essentially tiny solar-powered food factories.”
“Solar-powered food factories?” Mother repeats. She says it as though she’s evaluating a quarterly report. “That seems... unnecessarily whimsical.”
“They’re organelles,” I say. “I’m simplifying.”
“One should be careful not to oversimplify for children.”
Sienna doesn’t pay attention to my mother’s comment. She’s still staring solemnly and me and nodding. “Mmhmm.”
Casey’s shoulders begin to shake.
I ignore her.
“So the pea isn’t actually green because green is inside it. Green is the part of the light the chlorophyll doesn’t use.”
Sienna thinks about that for several long seconds.
Finally she nods once.
“So...”
“So?”
“The pea eats sunshine.”
A laugh escapes Brittany before she can stop it.
We all look at her.
She blinks, almost startled she’d made a sound at all.
“Sorry,” she says quietly. “That was... actually kind of adorable.”