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We’re leaving the sitting room — Theo’s hand at the small of my back, the one constant of the evening, the one thing that isn’t performed — when Maddison falls into step beside me.

“Hey.” She loops her arm through mine, easy and warm, the way she does everything. “Can I just say something real quick?”

“Of course,” I say.

We’ve fallen a few steps behind the others. My mother and father heading upstairs. Michael talking to Theo about something — I hear Theo’s terse one-syllable responses and feel a wave of affection so sudden it catches me. Maddison steers us to the bottom of the stairs.

She turns to face me. Her eyes are bright. She has her sister’s face and none of her sister’s editor.

“I’m just so glad we can move on from the past,” she says. “You know? All of us. As a family.” She squeezes my arm. Warm. Genuine. “I know things have been weird, and I’m glad tonight felt okay. It really means a lot that you’re here.”

I look at my sister.

She looks back, beaming, waiting for me to receive this.

Here is the inventory of what Maddison has just handed me. An assumption that the past is something we’ve moved on from. An assumption that things being “weird” is a neutral fact of the universe rather than a direct consequence of a specific thing she did. An assumption that my being here means I’m okay with all of it. And no apology. Not a shadow of one. Not even the shape of one in the negative space of what she said.

She didn’t apologize because she decided she doesn’t have to. That’s the part I’ve been carrying since the morning I found out. Maddison isn’t cruel by accident. She’s cruel the way people are cruel when they’ve told themselves a version of events that makes what they did okay — and she’s been telling that version long enough that she believes it completely. The story goes: Michael had feelings for her. These things happen. Nobody could help it. And if Margo is still hurt — well, that’s Margo’s problem to work through.

She wants to move on from the past the way you move on from something that was ultimately correct. Because in her version of events, it was correct. He made the better choice. Of course he did. Of course he chose her.

She slept with my boyfriend.

She is now engaged to my ex-boyfriend.

She is carrying his baby.

And I am standing at the bottom of my parents’ stairs being told she’s glad we can move on from the past.

The skin holds. It always holds. That’s what the skin is for.

“Of course,” I say. My voice comes out exactly right. Even, warm, the Charleston daughter. “I’m really glad for you both.”

She hugs me. Quick, easy, already half-turning back toward Michael. “Goodnight, sweet girl. We’ll have coffee in the morning.”

“Goodnight,” I say.

I watch her go. I stand at the bottom of my parents’ stairs with the knife in my ribs, and I breathe, and I count to three, and I go up.

The pink room is exactly as we left it. Bags by the bed. The four-poster. The window to the dunes. I go in and Theo follows and the door closes behind us and I hear the house settling around us, this old wooden house, and everything that happened today happens all at once in my chest, a single moment of pressure so complete I have to look at the window instead of at him.

“Hey,” he says, from somewhere behind me.

“I’m fine,” I say.

A beat. “Margo.”

“I just need a shower.” I pull the silk blouse loose. My hands are steady. I’m very good at steady. “Long day. I’ll feel better after.”

He doesn’t say anything. I don’t look at him. I take my things into the bathroom and I shut the door, because I need the shut door, I need the ten-foot radius of the en suite, I need the distance and the water and the sound.

I turn the shower on. I turn it up until the steam comes, until it’s as hot as it’ll go, and I step in, and I stand under it.

I wait for the fine to reassert itself.

It doesn’t.

Instead I think about my sister’s face when she said we’re engaged. My mother’s hands going to her cheeks. My father standing to welcome the man across the table. And Maddison at the bottom of the stairs, warm, meant, knowing nothing: I’m just so glad we can move on from the past.