She stood on one side of the piano.
I stood on the other.
Between us were forty years of music and eighteen months of everything we had refused to say.
Rebecca touched the edge of the bench.
“I found the plate again the week we moved in.”
I said nothing.
“I was cleaning underneath.”
Her thumb rubbed against the wood.
“I’d forgotten about Dad showing me.”
She laughed once without humor.
“Then I saw our names.”
I waited.
“I hated it.”
That surprised me.
“Why?”
“Because he was dead, and somehow he was still telling me how I was supposed to treat you.”
Her honesty was ugly.
But it was honesty.
Rebecca stared at the keys beneath the closed lid.
“I was angry at him.”
“For dying?”
Her mouth trembled.
“Yes.”
The answer came immediately.
Then she looked ashamed of it.
“I know how that sounds.”
“It sounds like grief.”
Her eyes lifted.
“But grief doesn’t excuse what you did.”
“No.”
“You changed the locks.”
“Yes.”
“You took my things out of rooms without asking.”
“Yes.”
“You made me ask permission in my own memories.”
Rebecca’s face crumpled.
I had not planned that sentence.
Once spoken, it hung there between us.
“I wanted the house to become mine,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“Because everything in it was yours and Dad’s.”
She pressed her fist against her chest.
“And every room reminded me that he was gone.”
“So you erased me too.”
Rebecca looked at me.
“I think I was trying to.”
There are confessions you want.
And then there are confessions that hurt more because they are true.
I gripped the back of a chair.
“Why?”
Her voice dropped.
“Because you still knew how to be his wife after he died.”
I stared at her.
“I didn’t know how to be his daughter.”
For the first time that night, I saw something beneath the anger.
