Chapter 4
Iwoke to the sound of pans and the smell of bread. Morning light fell through my bedroom window in a warm stripe across the quilt, and for a moment I lay there feeling the luxury of waking up somewhere that wasn’t a military cot.
I got dressed and headed downstairs. The kitchen was its usual beautiful chaos.
Angelina moved between the stove and table.
Sabrina sat at the table with her hair loose and one wing draped over the back of her chair, tearing pieces off a warm roll with her free hand.
Gabriella was already dressed and awake as well.
“Good morning, sleeping hero,” Sabrina said without looking up from her letter. “The chickens have been up for two hours. They’re very disappointed in you.”
“I’ll send a formal apology.” I poured tea into the clay mug Angelina pushed toward me and inhaled the steam.
Angelina set a plate of eggs in front of me. “Eat. Both of you. The day is not going to wait because you’re busy being charming.”
I ate. The eggs were perfect, which Angelina’s eggs always were. Gabriella had been unusually quiet through the meal, picking at her food, her eyes finding mine across the table and then skittering away like she was working up to something.
She found it halfway through my second cup of tea. “Can we do something today?”
“Of course,” I said.
“I want to spend today with you,” she said. “Just us. There are a few places I want to show you. Places that mattered while you were gone. I’ve been making a list.”
Sabrina’s head came up. “You’ve been making a list?”
“Yes. A list. Of things to show Gabriel. It’s organized by location and approximate emotional significance.”
“I want to show him things too,” Sabrina said, and something in her voice had changed from teasing to something that carried an edge. “I’ve been waiting six years. You’ve had him for a whole day already.”
“Yesterday was family day. Today is my day. I called it last night. You were there.”
“I don’t remember you calling anything. I remember cider and stars and Angelina crying, which was beautiful and also not a scheduling conference.”
Gabriella’s jaw set. “I need this.”
“I need it too.”
“Girls.” Angelina’s voice, quiet and steady, the voice that had ended approximately ten thousand sibling arguments over the past two decades.
She was wiping her hands on a dishcloth, her eyes moving between her daughters with the weary fondness of someone who’d seen this play before and knew all the lines by heart.
“Sabrina. Gabriel isn’t leaving again tomorrow.
Gabriella can have today. You can have tomorrow.
The island isn’t going anywhere. Neither is he. ”
Sabrina held Gabriella’s gaze for a beat longer than necessary then exhaled. “Fine.”
“Deal,” Gabriella said, and just like that the tension dissolved, the way it always did with them, sudden and complete, like weather changing its mind.
Twenty minutes later Gabriella and I were walking the eastern path through the orchard, Gabriella half a step ahead of me, talking with her hands the way she did when she was excited. She’d put on a clean blue dress and tied her dark blonde hair back.
We followed the old fence line, talking about everything except the farm. Gabriella pointed out the houses where childhood friends had moved away, the old bakery that had become a cooper’s workshop, and the maple tree we’d planted together before I left, now twice the height I remembered.
We cut through the village center, past the schoolhouse with its skybird nest on the roof, past the tavern where an older man nodded to me from the porch and didn’t try to start a conversation, which I appreciated more than he could know.
Everywhere we went, memories surfaced. The low stone wall where we’d sat eating stolen apples.
The hollow oak where we’d hidden from thunderstorms. The creek bed, dry now in late summer, where I’d taught her to skip stones and she’d promptly beaten my record by skipping one seven times, a fact she reminded me of approximately every thirty seconds as we passed.
“We should go to the cliffs,” she said. “The view’s better now. The storm two winters ago took down some of the older trees, and suddenly you can see all the way to the western islets on a clear day.”
The path to the cliffs wound up through thinning orchard and then open meadow, the grass knee-high and gone to seed, pale gold in the morning light.
We’d walked this path a hundred times as children, racing each other, stopping to catch breath, continuing the race as if the outcome mattered.
Today we walked it slowly, side by side, and the silence between us was the comfortable kind.
Then we passed the playground. I hadn’t thought about the playground in years.
It sat at the edge of the island, a collection of wooden structures built for children with wings: climbing frames with platforms too high for wingless reach, swings that launched from elevated perches, obstacle courses designed for bodies that could catch themselves when they fell.
The wood was gray with age and weather, the ropes frayed, the whole thing looking smaller than I remembered, which was how childhood landmarks usually worked.
Gabriella stopped walking, her body going still the way bodies do when they hit something they weren’t expecting to hit. “This is where it was the worst,” she said quietly.
I looked at her. Her profile was sharp against the morning light, her jaw tight, her eyes fixed on the playground with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
“The bullying,” she said. “This is where they always did it. Because here was where the difference mattered. Here was where I couldn’t keep up, couldn’t reach, couldn’t do any of the things the other kids could do without thinking.
” She swallowed. “Remember that swing? The high one? The one that launched from the platform? I tried it once. After you left. I climbed the ladder, took me forever, and I sat on the swing and I pushed off and for about two seconds I was flying, and then I hit the ground and broke my wrist.”
I remembered her writing about the broken wrist. She’d mentioned the playground. She hadn’t mentioned why.
“After you left,” Gabriella continued, her voice steady in the way that meant it was taking everything she had to keep it steady, “it got worse for a while. Not physically worse. Nobody hit me. But the words … the way they looked at me. Like I was broken. Like I was something that shouldn’t have happened.
” She turned to face me, and I saw then that her eyes were bright with tears she was refusing to let fall.
“You always made it better. You were always there. You’d step in and suddenly I wasn’t the wingless girl anymore, I was the girl Gabriel stood up for, and that was enough. That was always enough.”
Her voice cracked on the last word. A single tear escaped, tracking down her cheek, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand like she was annoyed with it for betraying her.
“Losing you was the hardest part,” she said.
“Not because I thought you were dead. Angelina never let me think that. She always said you were coming back. Always. Even when the lists came and other names were on them, she’d look at me and say ‘not his.’ And I believed her.
I always believed her.” Another tear, another quick wipe.
“But you were gone. And without you, I was just … me. Just the wingless girl. The one who didn’t belong.
The one who sat by herself at recess because the playground was built for people who could fly and nobody had thought to build a version for people who couldn’t. ”
The guilt hit me like a physical thing, a weight settling across my shoulders that had nothing to do with the scars already there.
I’d known, abstractly, that my absence had cost them.
I’d known about the farm, the labor, the burdens of survival.
I hadn’t known, hadn’t let myself know, what it had cost Gabriella to lose the one person who’d always stood between her and a world that saw her missing wings before it saw her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The words felt pathetically inadequate, the kind of thing you say when the real apology would need its own language.
I closed the distance between us and pulled her against my chest. She came willingly, her body folding into mine the way it had in the stable yesterday morning.
I held her. Her face pressed into the hollow of my collarbone, her fists bunched in the fabric of my shirt, her shoulders shaking with the effort of crying quietly because nineteen-year-old women who’ve spent their lives proving they’re strong don’t want to sob in public, even in an empty meadow, even with me.
I wrapped one arm around her shoulders and the other around the back of her head, cradling her the way you cradle something fragile, and let her fall apart against me.
Eventually, we broke the hug, and she shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t apologize. You didn’t choose the war. You didn’t choose to leave. I just …” She took a breath. “I just needed you to know. That’s all. I needed you to know what it was like.”
We stood there at the edge of the playground, the morning sun warming the gray wood, the empty swings moving slightly in the breeze, and I looked at her and saw, for the first time, the full measure of what those six years had taken from her.
A shield, a sense of belonging, and the one person who had always made sure she never felt like the thing the village sometimes treated her as: a mistake.
The guilt sat in my chest, heavy and hot, and I didn’t try to dislodge it. It belonged there. It had earned its place.