and two of them were related and had just met twenty minutes earlier. To make it even worse, the room had high ceilings, which seemed to make the silence echo around them, forks scraping against plates and sounding like someone yanking the needle off a record player over and over again.
“Well, we’re just so glad that the two of you could meet,” Diane said, her voice a bit louder than necessary.
Grace’s mom took the ball and ran with it, as moms often do.
“Oh, same here!” she said, smiling at both Maya and Grace. “You both look so alike, too. I know Grace has always wanted a sister.”
Grace looked at her mom, raising her eyebrow a little. Since when? But then she caught Maya glancing at her and quickly reset her face.
“If you’d like a sister, may I offer a suggestion?” Maya said, then gestured toward Lauren. “We’ll even throw in a set of free steak knives, but you have to act now. Operators are standing by.”
Lauren glared at Maya, and even though both Bob and Diane laughed, Grace could tell that they sort of wanted to murder Maya with their eyes. She laughed anyway, though. She couldn’t help it. Now she knew why Maya never wrote emails or texts like a normal human being: her humor was too dark.
“Maya and Lauren are either best friends or worst enemies,” Diane said, picking up her wineglass and then setting it down while Maya took a bite of chicken. “We actually found out that I was pregnant with Lauren three months after we brought Maya home. I mean, we tried for almost ten years to have a child, and then that? Two miracles in three months! We couldn’t believe our good luck.”
Grace saw her dad glance between Maya and Lauren, and she wondered if he was thinking what Grace was thinking: that those two were one dessert course away from a full-fledged cage match. Diane was either delusional or, more likely, trying to keep her children from ruining dinner.
“So what’s it like being an only child, Grace?” Lauren asked her. “Is it amazing? It sounds amazing.”
Maya’s mom cleared her throat and took a long swallow of wine.
“Um.” Grace looked at her plate for a second, then back at Lauren. “It’s . . . quiet?”
Every adult at the table laughed, and Grace smiled.
“It’s okay, I guess. I don’t know, it’s fine.”
Maya looked at her but spoke to her parents. “Can Grace and I be excused?” she asked. “We have, like, fifteen years of bonding to catch up on.”
“Sure, I suppose so,” her mom said. “Take your food with you, though? You don’t eat enough.”
“You know that’s a line straight out of the How to Give Your Daughter an Eating Disorder manual, right?” Maya said, but she was already pushing back her chair, grabbing her plate, and motioning to Grace to follow her.
Grace glanced at her mom, the roller-coaster train climbing farther up the track. “It’s fine, go ahead,” her mom said, and she left her plate and scampered up the stairs behind Maya, slipping a little on the marble.
The portrait wall Grace had seen when they’d first entered the house was more striking up close, and she found herself walking more slowly as she looked at the photos. They were candids and professional portraits from over the years, from Maya and Lauren as babies up until what looked like the most recent shot, taken last Christmas. Maya stood out in every single photo, the one brunette in a family of redheads, her smile getting less and less full over the years.
The minute they were in Maya’s room, Maya shut the door and let out a huge sigh. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, that was brutal,” she said, untwisting her hair out of the bun. Grace realized that it was way longer than her hair, and she wondered if maybe she should grow hers back out, too.
“Oh, it’s—yeah, it’s cool.” Grace looked around the room, at the blue ribbons won for . . . something sporty, probably. “Your parents seem nice.”
Maya shot her a look in the mirror. “You know those ribbons are just participation awards, right?”
“Oh,” Grace said.
Maya pulled her hair over her shoulder, then tossed it back again. “I told my parents, like, a million times, don’t do a fancy dinner, let’s just get pizza or something, don’t make it weird. And what do they do? They make it weird.”