The Rose Bargain (The Rose Bargain #1)

by Sasha Peyton Smith

There’s no possible universe in which my sister’s heart stops beating and I keep on living, unaltered.

The fun of grace is to watch someone fall from it.

I don’t doubt the same two questions play in all our heads: What have we done to ourselves? and What will we do to each other?

I close my eyes and give myself the space of a breath to mourn for my younger self. I’m sorry, I whisper through time, for all the things you didn’t get to be.

A family doesn’t need two stars, and Lydia was already ours.

We can’t bear how much we love each other. It’s like an open wound we can’t touch for all the stinging it causes.

“Does the coxswain really fit in here?” “Johnny is the smallest on our team. We fold him up like an elegant napkin, and he barks orders at us like a stern governess.”

If I weren’t so horribly defined by everything I’ve ever loved and lost, maybe I could be the kind of person who moved through life easily.

My heart leaps into my throat, but the space between us goes quiet and still. It’s not desire I feel, but the burn of inevitability. I swam in the sea once as a child and got knocked over by a wave. I tumbled in the surf, scraped my knees against the sand, and snorted water up my nose. It was the first time I felt truly small, the first time I knew what it felt like to be carried away by a force I couldn’t control. I taste salt water in the back of my throat now.

Her hurt is spilled out onto the floor, messy in a way that demands it be witnessed. Mine, shoved so deep down, my steps are heavier with the weight of it.

Why can’t she suffer in a more palatable way? Why can’t she find a way to make her agony lovable, her pain marriageable, when I’m trying so hard?

Be prettier when you cry, the part of me I hate most wa...

Maybe this is the crux of my anger with Lydia. I am ready to marry a man I do not love to save our family. I am relieved that Lydia, the person I love most in the world, will be spared the same fate, yet I resent her for letting me do it all alone.

Ivy would sometimes make biting comments about how she lived permanently in my shadow, but I was jealous of her too. Our jealousy fed on itself until it tangled into the very fabric of our relationship.

“I love you, Ivy. I’m sorry if I ever made you doubt it.” Doubt it? All she did was make me doubt it. From the very first moment she left me alone in the garden, I’ve doubted it. I’ve spent half my life chasing her approval. It’s the entire reason we made a good pair of best friends.

“I couldn’t stand it!” Lydia stands up at the table, knocking her chair over behind her. “I was perfect and sweet and good, and then I realized one day I was never going to get to be anything but that. You, Mother, and Father all put me on this pedestal I never asked for. I couldn’t live up there forever.”

“I love you,” I say. It’s not quite a lie. I want to love him, I really do. “I love you, too.” He can’t lie. For the second time tonight, my heart shatters.