The Sister-in-Law: An absolutely gripping summer thriller for 2021 by Pamela Crane (best romance novels of all time .TXT) 📗

was strong enough to kill him. If life had taught me anything over the past year, it was that happiness was fleeting. Momentary. Sadness held on much longer. Happiness was the calm amid the storm. It broke through the clouds on overcast days, but it was never enough to sunbathe in.

‘First of all, I don’t hate you.’ I could detect sincerity in her voice. ‘And while I don’t know what it’s like to carry that much grief, you have to think about how it affects your kids. They’re always fighting, always complaining. Don’t you see what you’re doing to them?’

What I’m doing to them?

‘I appreciate your concern, but you’ll see when you have your own kids that parenting is not always black and white. We don’t always do the right thing or know the right answer. Sometimes we have to parent in the gray.’

While my words remained calm, my thoughts grew turbulent. She was essentially blaming me for screwing up my kids. She probably blamed me for Ben’s death, and for losing the baby. Hadn’t I blamed myself enough already? I couldn’t continue to be nice anymore. Images of hurting Candace flashed through my mind like tiny lightning bolts zapping my brain. Thoughts of poisoning her to spare her unborn baby the misery of having her for a mother …

I shook the awful, terrifying thought away as I fingered the pile of apple seeds collecting on the counter. One hundred and forty apple seeds would provide enough cyanide to kill a woman of Candace’s size. I had looked it up; I didn’t know why.

I scooped the seeds into a bowl, grabbed Elise’s diary, and headed upstairs.

Chapter 11

Candace

You once told me that you felt broken beyond repair.

Let me mend you. Let me make you whole again.

I was a mirror that had been dropped one too many times. Life didn’t shatter me, but it left a splinter so big that it made me feel worthless. A cracked mirror is just broken glass. Sharp to the touch, and it’ll make you bleed. And when you looked at me, all you would see was an ugly, distorted reflection of yourself.

That was who I was. All the worst parts of every woman: needy, jealous, insecure. I was either too much or never enough. And then I met Lane, and suddenly the worst parts fell off of me. Maybe they didn’t so much as fall off as become invisible, because Lane didn’t seem to see them. Sometimes I still saw them, though.

As I stepped out of the shower, I swiped across the foggy bathroom mirror and hated the woman who looked back at me with arctic blue eyes that had witnessed too much darkness. Wrapping a towel around my chest and tucking the corner in to hold it up, I ran a comb through my hair, the black even blacker and the blue highlights barely noticeable. Some days I didn’t even recognize myself, and those were the days I was happiest.

Today I was that dropped mirror again, and I despised myself because others despised me first.

My parents were the first to drop me. Crack! The day they died left a fracture I would never recover from. The worst part was that I had survived, forced to live with the memory. My mother cowering over me in the corner of our trailer, begging for my life. She didn’t care what happened to her, as long as her baby girl got the future she never had. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a future if she wasn’t in it.

I felt it before I heard it, the shift of weight as her body relaxed on top of mine, smothering me, then a sticky wetness drip-drip-dripping onto my only good pair of jeans. Justice brand, all the rage. Mom had been so excited when she found them at Goodwill with the tags still on! Only after I felt her dead weight did I hear the crack of the gun.

The memory didn’t end there. That would have been too kind. After I screamed and in a panic pushed my mother’s lifeless body off of me, I looked up at my father’s face – bloated with sweat and red with fury, veins blue and pulsing with cocaine – as he turned the gun on himself. Opened his thick jaw. Aimed the barrel between tobacco-stained teeth. Then … crack! Both parents gone, life as I knew it skewed beyond recognition. Just. Like. That.

Boyfriends who stole my innocence continued to break me. Crack! Friends who used me then abandoned me splintered me further. Crack! Then, one day, I found an adhesive: Love. It glued all my pieces back together into something whole. Someone new, with purpose. Love could do that, you know. It recycled the heart.

A knock on the bathroom door pulled me back into the present. Then another soft knock. The knock of a child’s knuckles.

‘Yes?’ I said to the door.

Again: knock … knock. Slowly, intentionally.

I swung open the door, but the hallway was empty.

‘What the hell?’ I spoke into the dead air.

I glanced up and down the hallway – nothing. Maybe the kids were playing a prank. Or maybe I was just hearing things. It wouldn’t have been the first time. When I closed the door and returned to the sink, the mirror dripped with condensation like it was crying. Most days I felt like crying too.

I rooted through my makeup bag for my essentials. A dash of bronzer, a swipe of mascara, Burt’s Bees shimmer lip gloss. Less is more when you have the taut skin of a woman in her twenties. A couple days ago, when passing Harper’s room, I caught her mid-makeup-routine. There couldn’t have been fewer than fifteen products on her face. The sight made me dread my thirties.

Heading to my bedroom closet, I still hadn’t decided what to wear yet. Outfit number one was a surefire way to piss Harper off – a bralette showing underneath a strappy floral maxi dress – but we