Noah stood up and walked to the window, looking out at the gravel parking lot below my apartment.
“She has the brick house,” Noah said. “She has Josh’s pension.”
“The pension was small, Noah.”
“She has enough,” he said. “Do not give her more.”
I gathered the white lilies into a tight bundle and tied the blue ribbon in a double knot. I had to know if Clara was really struggling, or if she was just testing our loyalty again. We had spent our entire lives trying to prove we were worth the space we took up in her house.
“I have to go,” I said. “It is her birthday.”
Noah turned around, his face flat and unreadable.
“She does not care about the flowers, Eric,” he said. “She only cares about who is listening to her.”
“She took us in,” I said. “When Elena left us.”
Noah flinched slightly at our biological mother’s name, then looked back out at the grey autumn sky.
“Elena left because she did not want us,” Noah said. “Clara reminds us of that every year.”
I did not have an answer for him, because we both knew the story by heart. We had been left with nothing but our names and a quiet anger that we never spoke about in front of Clara.
“We were four years old when Clara told us the story for the first time,” I said to him. “We sat on the rug in the living room, and she told us our real mother had walked out because she wanted a different life.”
Noah did not look up, but his shoulders went rigid.
“I remember,” he said.
“And now we are supposed to just ignore her sixty-first birthday because she asked for money?”
“Yes,” Noah said. “She has Josh’s study locked up. She has his books. She has everything.”
