Confessions from the Quilting Circle, Maisey Yates [animal farm read TXT] 📗

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We spent way too much time not talking in this family,” Avery said. “I’m getting quilt squares and tea, and we are going to sew and you can tell me why that bastard made you cry.”

“It wasn’t him,” Hannah said, scratchy.

“I had a run-in with David tonight,” Avery said conversationally as she walked into the kitchen. Hannah craned her neck from her position on the couch.

“Did he do anything to you?”

“He was...” Avery appeared in the doorway. “I don’t love him. I’m glad I got to see him. Because that was... That was clarifying. It’s like now that I see everything I can’t go back to how I saw them before. And it’s good. I’m glad of that. Because part of me felt so conflicted, and now I just don’t. I’m scared. Don’t get me wrong. And I’m far from happy. Or joyous, I guess. But I know that I can’t go back there. I cannot go back to that life I was living. I just see it too clearly now.”

“That’s good,” Hannah said, knowing she sounded miserable.

“Tell me what’s going on?”

“It’s stupid,” Hannah said. “Because you’re going through something that’s real. And I’m mad that I didn’t get the position that I want in the orchestra.”

“And that’s why you’re crying on the night you had a surprise date with your ex-boyfriend?”

“It’s part of it.”

“Tell me. As long as you still want tea.”

And Hannah knew that she had an out. She could pretend that this conversation hadn’t begun. But as she sat there holding the book, she felt that for some reason she shouldn’t. That for some reason, she should sit with her sister, and talk. Talk for the first time.

“Something happened,” Hannah said. She looked up and met Avery’s eyes. “To me.”

Phrasing it that way felt strange. And when she told the story about Marc, her sister’s face stayed smooth. As if she knew that what Hannah needed was an impassive listener, who would offer neither judgment nor sympathy. Or anger.

Because telling the story, listening to it, paying attention to how it made her feel... That was what she needed.

To hear her own story come from her mouth, to experience it not as a seventeen-year-old girl who felt wise in the ways of the world and filled with ambition, but a thirty-six-year-old woman, who knew quite how young seventeen was, and was well aware of all the life experience the girl she’d been hadn’t had.

And when she was finished, she just sat for a moment.

“Did Josh get angry at you?” Avery asked softly.

Hannah shook her head. “No. He said it wasn’t my fault.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don’t know. I feel closer to knowing something now. But... I don’t know.”

“I had a confrontation with David tonight, like I said. And there was something... Something kind of magical that happened. I realize that I am a victim. And you’re the one who told me I was, Hannah, with all the conviction of someone standing outside the situation. But it hurts to hear that. Because to me a victim is someone who’s weak. But that’s not how it works. I’m not a victim because I’m weak, I’m a victim because a person that I trusted very much took advantage of that trust. Abused it. Broke it. And recognizing that I’m a victim lifts an immense burden off of me. And it doesn’t mean sitting here and feeling that forever, but it does mean finding a way to take it and use it. To use that label, to use that feeling.”

“I didn’t say no,” Hannah said.

“And I stayed with David. But sometimes you’re so deep in a situation you can’t see it for what it is.” Avery looked at her. “It takes someone outside of it to see it for you. You did that for me. Can I do it for you?”

“But you didn’t... I mean, this was years ago.”

“Does it hurt still? Is it why you didn’t feel like you could take what Josh was offering you tonight?”

“I always felt like I took what he gave me and destroyed it in a really kind of awful way. I think we probably would have broken up anyway, I think we had to. I had to get out there in the world and see what else there was.” Her mind went blank then, her emotions blank. And it was good. It was like seeing everything impartially. Clearly.

“I think I stayed in Boston, with the symphony, longer and with more single-mindedness because I felt like I paid for it. And I had to... I couldn’t turn back.”

“You earned it,” Avery said. “You wouldn’t have done what you did for all these years if you hadn’t earned it. You can’t let what he did reduce your success to you... Paying for with your body. It isn’t fair. If it was so right why does it hurt all this time later? If you wanted it, why are you so ashamed?”

It was so different, sitting across from Avery and having this conversation. Because Avery was strong, she wasn’t weak. And Hannah realized... She had been yelling at herself, when she had yelled at her sister, defending the person who had hurt her. Screaming at that girl from long ago who had pretended everything was fine. Who had been too afraid to say no, because the consequences might have meant her not getting her dream.

That was why she was so angry.

She was angry at herself.

Because she had spent so many years convincing herself that every choice she’d made had been hers. That she was strong enough to move through anything, even if it was unpleasant. That it didn’t touch her. But the ends were always worth the means.

That she had been a seventeen-year-old girl who had acted with clarity of mind, and made a trade. That she could handle being a whore because she’d gotten what she wanted.

“If I’m just a girl whose music teacher held a letter of recommendation over