Imagines her voice overlapped by their father’s—the viciousness to him, brittle trace at the tops of his teeth. The way he could be funny, genial, then breathtakingly cruel. He would get irrationally angry when you weren’t having a good time, when you couldn’t just get on with it. Can’t you just not be, he said to Isla when she told him she was gay. She feels furious in a way that is like being possessed, an emotion not entirely her own infesting her. “And that’s good,” she says. “It’s fine that you had an easier time of it and it’s fine that you never had to cope with our mother before he
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