The Wrong Daughter

by Dandy Smith

In this moment, they are young and carefree, their futures as organic and as wild as the meadow around them. And though they don’t yet know it, this is the very last perfect afternoon the sisters will share.

She doesn’t really understand what alone is. But she will. In the coming months and years, she will come to understand alone all too well.

‘Being a big sister is very important.’

doesn’t want a mundane and dishonest ‘fine’, like most people do when they ask. He genuinely wants to know.

Loneliness threatens to overwhelm me again, coming for me in an enormous barrelling wave.

I didn’t mean to fall in love with him.

But who will my mother see as I step into the white gown? Me or Olivia? Will she shed a tear because she’s overjoyed that her youngest is getting married, or because her eldest never will? And how will I feel on that day as I walk down the aisle without my sister? Knowing she will never have a happily-ever-after. That she was stripped of it. Of everything. Because I didn’t save her the way she saved me.

‘I want you there. I need you with me.’ He glances away, and for a moment, I really believe he’ll refuse. But then he nods and some of the tension melts away. ‘I’ll be there.’ He pulls me close and kisses the top of my head. ‘Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. Of course I’m coming.’

patience tracing-paper thin.

Wanting to please your parents is one of those universal instincts, like opening your mouth to apply mascara.

‘Sometimes, the only person worth satisfying is yourself. It’s your life, you’ve got to live it for you.’

I know loneliness, the taste and smell and shape of it. The clawing desperation to slough it off like dead skin. Loneliness is the most harrowing kind of poverty.

‘How are you supposed to know what you want to do?’ she asks in a small voice. ‘I guess you think about what you enjoy doing and you chase it.’

‘Don’t be afraid to play the main character in your own life. Don’t be a person that things just happen to because it’s easier than being a person who makes things happen.’

The irony is not lost on me that the life I am missing now is the same life that, just days ago,

‘She was my whole world but I was only a part of hers. She started to get restless, unhappy, she wanted more than I could give her.’ He shrugs. ‘I had to let her go.’

‘She deserves to be happy. I didn’t want to hold her back.’

She keeps talking and I keep smiling. What I feel though is a thud of despair. The shame of not being enough. Of being sidelined once more as the understudy, because the star of the show has returned.

‘She isn’t my sister.’ I’m not entirely sure why I’ve chosen this moment to tell him but then I remember how Gideon reacted when I admitted the same thing to him. He didn’t treat me as though I’m hysterical. He listened with an open mind. He believed me. I realise I’m testing Oscar because I want my fiancé to believe me too.

the people who matter are the ones who won’t rush to judge.’

I’m not even thirty, there’s still time to change track. If I’ve got another forty years of working, I want to make sure that whatever career I choose, it’s one that will make me happy.’

He doesn’t love me enough to fix the damage he has done. He doesn’t love me enough to even try.

That isn’t love. Or, it isn’t a love I want. I feel the words falling out of my mouth before I realise I’ve even said them. ‘Oscar? I think this is it. We can’t do this anymore.’

‘OK.’ I feel a clench of disappointment that he isn’t fighting for us.