Kayla pointed at him. “Nobody asked you.”
“He’s allowed to speak in his own kitchen.”
Andrew set the bags down. “Thank you, Amanda.”
Kayla rolled her eyes, but there was no fight behind it.
Then Andrew looked at me. “And next time something affects both of us, I won’t hide behind ‘she’s your sister.’”
“Good.”
Kayla groaned. “Are you two going to become emotionally healthy right in front of me?”
“Probably,” Andrew said. “You can move out if it’s unbearable.”
She threw a dish towel at him.
I want to describe the weeks that followed, because the story didn’t simply resolve itself neatly at that kitchen table, satisfying as that conversation was. Kayla started applying for jobs in earnest that same week, sending out applications every morning at the kitchen table with a focus I hadn’t seen from her since before Eric. She landed a position within about ten days at a marketing firm two towns over, entry-level but steady, the kind of role she’d have once considered beneath her ambitions and now approached with something closer to gratitude. She started therapy too, a decision she mentioned to me almost sideways one evening, admitting that a coworker had recommended someone and that she figured it couldn’t hurt to talk to a professional about “the whole Eric thing,” a phrase she still couldn’t quite say more directly than that.
Andrew and I had our own quiet reckoning in the weeks that followed, separate from anything involving Kayla directly. We talked, a few nights after that Sunday morning confrontation, about what “staying out of it” actually meant in a marriage, about the difference between respecting my relationship with my sister and simply disappearing from a conflict that was affecting both of us equally. It wasn’t a dramatic conversation, nothing like the kitchen scene with Kayla, just two people at their own kitchen table, later that night, working through something that had been sitting slightly wrong between them without either of us fully naming it until then.
Kayla moved into Renee’s spare room six weeks after that Sunday, not the first room we’d toured but a different listing that came up a few weeks later, closer to her new job and, according to Kayla, with better light in the mornings. She still comes for dinner most Sundays now, dressed, always dressed, and the joke about the robe has become one of those small, durable family jokes that outlives the original conflict entirely, surfacing at holidays and casual dinners alike, Kayla rolling her eyes every time someone brings it up while never quite asking us to stop.
The next morning after that Sunday, I heard the shower before seven. Andrew was drinking coffee when footsteps came down the stairs. He glanced at me. I glanced back.
Kayla entered wearing the ancient blue robe from our linen closet. It had faded ducks across the pockets and one sleeve slightly shorter than the other. She went straight to the coffee maker.
