"Yes," she whispered, pulling back the unfastened strands of hair that feathered over her face, hiding the quiver in her fingers as she neatly tucked them behind her ear. Her hands shook as she crossed her arms over her chest, and she stiffly shifted her weight for a semblance of composure. It was almost comical given the white bedsheet firmly wrapped around her naked body, draping to the floor, and the disheveled pale blonde hair that cascaded in ripples down her shoulders.

"Yes?" He echoed. He did not expect the crack in his voice or the tightness that encircled his throat. Tension spread across his chest and squeezed at his insides, pitting his stomach against the eggs and bacon he'd had for breakfast.

It wasn't the answer he hoped for.

"You're confused." It wouldn't be the first time. He had to believe that. But the crushing feeling inside his chest had not ebbed. And he remembered their bodies, naked and tangled, his labored breaths and desperate thrusts as he sought his release and longed for hers. Her eyes squeezed tightly shut, almost painfully so when he finally went limp inside her. She never uttered a sound, not even after their bodies came unjoined. Then this morning, leaning in to kiss her lips, the slight cold turn of her head, only to graze the corners of her mouth. He realized it had not been the first time.

"I'm not. Not anymore." There was a tremble in her voice that did not match the resolute look in her azure eyes. She cast a disquieted glance to their bedroom, the door slightly ajar. "But you still haven't asked—" she paused. "I know how this seems. And you're not wrong, but it's also not—"

He heard a strangled sob from their bedroom through the opened crack, and every muscle in his body tensed. They both turned to look. The door clicked shut, and he clenched his jaw. He caught her eyes as he turned back to face her, and he could see the panic and shame in them. She was afraid of him. And afraid for what lay beyond that door.

For the intruder that had fractured their lives.

Ten years, he thought, the anger billowing in his eyes. He remembered tentative glances. Their sweaty palms as they held hands in school hallways, the awkward first kiss as their teeth clanked, the first night making love under the stars in the back seat of his father's car. It was all ending.

"My sister! My baby sister!" He screamed, pointing to their bedroom, his arm shaking and his face burning a seething red. In that moment he couldn't love and hate her more. Why he still loved her, he wasn't sure, but he fought against the urge to latch onto her throat and squeeze the breath out of her.

"I know," she sobbed, pressing a hand against the wall as her enervating legs threatened to collapse beneath her. "I'm awful and weak. I didn't mean for any of this. Please, don't blame her."

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The bedsheet inched down her chest, unveiling a bright red bruise on the inner swell of her breast. That's when he took in just how swollen her lips were and how flushed and pink her skin was. The glistening glow of sex radiating off of her like an animal in heat. Minutes before she had been calling out someone else's name, enjoying someone else's touch in a way that she never had with him. She never craved him like he craved her.

"Claire," he began to say, but her name caught in his throat, and evaporated into thin air. She never loved me.

He left.

The screen door slapped shut loudly behind him as he fumbled through his pockets for his keys. He could barely see under the tears that welled in his eyes. He could hear her now, the creek of the door as the intruder made her way out of the bedroom, her feet slapping on the wooden floors. And likely running into his wife's arms.

She wasn't always an intruder. Once, she was the little girl that used to wrap her arms around his neck and beg him to tell her stories; the girl who used to cover for him when their parents caught him in a lie, and who used to give him skittles when he was feeling sick, but only the green ones because she liked those the least. The girl who’d beg him time and again to read her Anne of Green Gables, even though their mother was the better storyteller.

"Why do you like that silly book so much?"

"It's not silly!"

"Fine, it's not silly."

"Don't you think she's just so amazing?"

"Amazing how?"

"She's not afraid to walk on rooftops or go up against the boys. She's so brave."

"Is that what you think bravery is? Walking on rooftops? She's crazy, and you're no better."

Ellie laughed, the kind of childish laugh that chimed like a string of tiny bells. Her small fingers clasped the book to her chest, and he couldn't imagine his little sister ever being anything other than a boisterous child.

Except now she wasn't so little anymore. Not after what he'd seen. Her head of tousled red hair buried between her thighs, hands touching where they shouldn't. With my wife.

She was behind him now, her hands pressed against the screen mesh of the door that divided them, her breath disparate and rattled. And he remembered nights more than a decade ago, her small body trembling and wheezing, ravaged by fevers and chronic illness. Little hands that clung to him in the darkness.

"Ephraim, please don't tell dad," his sister called out through the screen door, the desperation unmistakable in her voice. But it wasn't the voice of a child, it was a stranger. A woman who had taken her place.

He burst into a hollow laugh and dropped his keys. When he crouched down to pick them up, he froze in place. Watching as his tears evaporated on the hot concrete.