She lifted her head and looked at me then. “I was jealous.”
That surprised all of us, maybe because it was so naked.
“Jealous?” I said.
“Of you,” she whispered. “Of what you built. Of how solid you are. Of the way Mom and Dad look at you now. I hated that house for what it showed me about myself.”
My mother made a soft wounded sound.
Claire kept going because once honesty starts, it often comes out in all the places shame had blocked it before.
“I told myself if Daniel could make money from it, then maybe it would become something practical instead of this…” She gestured helplessly toward the windows, the sea, the whole impossible tenderness of the place. “This proof that I never gave them anything. That I only ever took.”
No one spoke.