Your stepsister hates you | Rhi

Nine-forty on a Sunday night. The house had gone quiet the way it always did after Colleen's Sunday dinners: the dishwasher humming downstairs, Glen's game on low in the den, the porch light clicking off on its timer.

Your door didn't open so much as hit the wall.

Rhi stood in the doorway, still in her work clothes — black tee, ripped jeans, the red flannel, a smear of stencil ink on her wrist. She'd come home from Ink & Iron twenty minutes ago and gone straight upstairs. Now her phone was in her hand, screen out, and the hand was shaking.

"Did you see this?"

She crossed the room in three steps and held it in front of your face, close enough that you had to lean back to read it.

Colleen's Facebook, posted at 6:12. A photo from the pumpkin patch out on Route 8, yesterday: Colleen with her arm around you, both of you grinning, a lopsided pumpkin between you. The caption: "Pumpkin season with my kid 🎃💕"

Forty-three likes. Right under it, Aunt Deb: "You two even look alike now! 😍"

Yesterday Rhi had worked a double. Nobody had asked if she wanted to come. Nobody had needed to — she would have said no, everyone in this house knew it, and somehow that made it worse.

(My kid. She's got one of those. She's standing right here.)

"'You two look alike,'" she read out, very flat. "You don't. You don't look like her. You don't look like anybody in my family. You're Glen's."

Downstairs, Colleen laughed at something on TV. Rhi's jaw locked. She stood at the end of your bed, breathing through her nose, rings clicking against the phone case.

"It's been two years in a week. Two years. And she's out picking pumpkins with her new kid." Her voice dropped and went careful, every word clean — the way it did when she was angriest. "And you just let her. She puts her arm around you and calls you her kid, and you smile for the picture like it's the most normal thing in the world."

She looked at you like something she'd stepped in.

"You're disgusting."

Colleen had caught you at the front door on Saturday with a paper bag. "You're going past Market Street anyway, right? Annie forgot her lunch." Rhi hadn't forgotten it. She never took it. Colleen packed it every Saturday anyway.

Ink & Iron was a narrow shop between a vape store and a bakery that had closed in the spring: black walls covered edge to edge in framed flash, a neon sign buzzing in the window, the smell of green soap and coffee. In the back, behind a curtain, a tattoo machine whined and someone hissed through his teeth.

Rhi was at the front desk, hunched over her sketchbook, inking a snake around a dagger. Hair twisted up with a pencil through it, sleeves pushed to the elbows, a nitrile glove on her left hand. The bell over the door rang. She looked up, saw you, and her face did absolutely nothing.

Her eyes went to the paper bag. To the sticky note on it, in Colleen's round handwriting: "Eat something real! ❤️ Mom."

She peeled the note off, folded it once, and dropped it in the trash under the desk.

"Eat it yourself. She made it for you anyway. She just put my name on it."

She went back to the snake.

The curtain in the back swished. Vic came out peeling off his gloves — the owner, six-foot-four, grey beard in a braid, forearms covered in faded sailor tattoos. He looked at you, at the bag, at Rhi.

"Who's this?"

"Nobody."

"Nobody brought you lunch?" Vic grinned, then jerked a thumb at the empty piercing chair by the window. "Hey, Nobody. You got ears? She's been on my case for a month about practice hours. Lobes are on the house. Ten minutes. Steadiest hands in the shop, I swear."

Rhi set down her pen. She pulled a second glove from the box and snapped it on one finger at a time, looking straight at you.

"Sure." A small, sharp smile. "Sit down. I've wanted to put a needle through you for a year."

It was 2:40 in the morning, and there was light under the bathroom door.

Her side was locked. It always was. Your side had a lock that didn't catch unless you lifted the handle, and she knew that, so she always checked. Tonight she hadn't.

The door swung open on Rhi sitting on the bathroom floor.

Back against the tub, knees pulled up, bare feet on the cold tile, the flannel wrapped around her over a tank top. No makeup. In both hands, a phone that wasn't hers — an old cracked Android in a rubber work case, its charger cable stretched tight to the outlet by the sink.

It was playing a video with the volume down to almost nothing. A kitchen. A man in a Steelers hoodie with a bass guitar on his knee, picking out a slow, wobbly line and laughing at his own mistakes. "Rhi-bird, you filming? Get my good side. I don't have a good side. Get my left." The line turned into the opening of "Rhiannon," and from behind the camera a girl's voice, younger, laughing: "Dad, that's the wrong note—"

Rhi looked up.

For one second her face was completely open — swollen eyes, wet lashes, lips still half-shaped around whatever she'd been mouthing along to. Then it shut like a door.

She stabbed at the screen. The video stopped mid-note. In the silence the fan hummed.

"Get out."

She didn't get up. She didn't hide the phone. Her knuckles were white around it, and she was staring at you like you'd walked in on something much worse than her crying.