was going to do about her pancake idea.
She was standing in the kitchen considering it when Rose bounced into the room.
“What are you doing here?” Iris asked.
“I’ve been up working for hours,” Rose said. “I came to see if there was food.”
“And you couldn’t see if there was food at your and Logan’s house?”
“I was closer to here. Plus, Logan was out working too, so he wasn’t cooking me breakfast.”
Iris scowled. “Well, neither was I. In fact, I have to head to work.”
She grabbed the bag of pancake mix, a mixing bowl and her griddle, completely laden down with things.
“Wait,” Rose said, “you’re going to make pancakes for somebody else?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because I am trading for those pancakes. The pancakes are a form of payment. You don’t pay me. You just expect there to be pancakes.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Rose said.
But Rose never meant anything any way. Iris loved her sister so much. She had basically raised her. But only basically. Rose wasn’t her daughter. And Iris hadn’t been an adult. She had been a sad fourteen-year-old girl who had lost her mother, and had found some solace in playing mother to her desolate little sisters.
Because there was no one there to comfort her. So somehow, becoming strong and being the one to offer the comfort had... Well, it had felt like getting it herself.
But that kind of emotional surrogacy just didn’t last. Because now everybody was moving on and leaving her, and she was just this object. Someone who seemed comforting and warm and easy to everyone around her.
When she felt nothing like that inside.
She had pushed her own grief down. Kept it away. Had done her best not to deal with that at all, while she had poured herself into fixing things for other people.
And the added bonus had been hiding away.
Because the world was nothing more than terrifying to a child who lost their parents suddenly. A child who’d had to learn at an early age that you could wake up one morning expecting everything to be the same, and find that it was irrevocably changed.
Broken beyond repair.
She’d heard it said that it was always darkest before the dawn. That the night would end, and the sun would rise, but Iris had learned that when the sun rose, your grief would still be there. And the loss would remain.
That saying didn’t mean that everything would be fine. That everything would go back to the way it was.
All it meant to her was that time would march on, whether you were ready for it to or not.
And here time was, marching on. And she surely wasn’t ready for it. Not remotely. She was being left behind by it.
And Rose was here wanting pancakes. While she had a fiancé she would go home with tonight. A man who would hold her in his arms. A future that wasn’t just assisting in the lives of other people.
Iris tramped out of the kitchen, through the living room and out toward her car, where she put all the pancake objects onto the passenger seat. Then she went back into the house, and opened up the freezer. She selected a couple of different meal options from there, held them to her chest as she stalked back outside.
“Don’t be mad at me,” Rose said from the porch, leaning against one of the support beams.
She turned and looked at her sister, who looked comically young and plaintive. And Iris didn’t feel young at all.
She felt every inch the old maid spinster that she was. Having a fit with a bag of pancake mix, though. So, there was that. It was different, at least.
“I’m not,” Iris said, even though her heart felt bruised, and she did feel a little bit mad, thank you very much.
“I don’t take you for granted,” Rose said. “I know that this made it seem like I do. But I don’t. You are the best, Iris. And if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have... I wouldn’t have Logan, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t be any kind of well-adjusted. You took care of me. You put your life on hold for me. Don’t think that I don’t realize that.”
“I know you realize it. And you tried to fix it by setting me up with the worst man in the entire world.”
“Hey,” Rose said, “he wasn’t the worst.”
Iris suddenly felt fatigued. “No. He was. Because you could have set me up with a guy with a neck tattoo, at least.