Antonia's Choice by Nancy Rue

seemed to have somehow pulled herself together. Her face, in fact, was a thinly hardened mask, like the shell of an M&M.
    She and I struggled to get her two suitcases—each the size of a FedEx truck—into the trunk of the Lexus. My mother hadn’t been kidding; she wanted this girl out of her house completely.
    As I slammed the trunk, I could see Ben in the backseat. He hadfound the blanket I always kept on board, and had pulled it over himself, so that he resembled an Afghan woman in a
burka.
I let it go.
    But I felt bad for Wyndham, who wasn’t exactly everybody’s best friend right now. I asked her about school and boys and what radio station she wanted to listen to, until I realized it was absolutely ridiculous. She was answering politely—that was always Wyndham—but the resistance was palpable. I was buttering burnt toast.
    â€œLook, I know this is awkward for both of us,” I said finally. “But I don’t want to get into specifics right now.” I nodded toward the backseat, where I was sure Ben was taking in my every nuance.
    â€œSure,” Wyndham said. “I’m pretty tired anyway.”
    To my amazement—and my relief—she leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes. In the blessed silence, with both of them shut up in their own little worlds, I had a chance to observe my niece in sidelong glances as I headed for the interstate.
    She was much taller and thinner than she’d been the last time I’d seen her, which had only been December to April. Without the child-chubbiness in her cheeks, she looked strikingly like Stephanie.
    Both my sisters had wavy dark hair. Bobbi always wore hers kid-friendly—ponytail poking through a hole in a ball cap, a braid trailing down her back at birthday parties, a scrunchie always at the ready on her wrist. Stephanie’s was full and stunning, and Wyndham’s was like hers, though with no apparent effort. Right now it was pulled up in a haphazard bun whose tendrils danced each time she cocked her head. It belied her obviously wretched inner state.
    All three of us Kerrington girls had brown
eyes,
mine small and dark and intense, Stephanie’s and Bobbi’s large and soulful. Wyndham had inherited theirs, though from the few glimpses I’d gotten at her while I was juggling Ben and luggage and trunk lids, they were wary, cautious.
    Why wouldn’t they be?
I thought.
I
can hear Mama now telling her that Aunt Toni was going to rip her up one side and down the other.
    That would also account for her currently sucking in on theoverbite. Hers was understated, even more so than Stephanie’s. She actually had a mouth like Sid’s—full lips, a reluctant smile that had required coaxing even when she was a baby. As the first grandchild, she had endured a lot of that.
    The thought of Baby Wyndham, wide-eyed and solemn in her infant seat, put a lump in my throat. How much of that innocence had been erased when she discovered her father’s secret propensity for photographing little girls in the nude?
    I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what had actually occurred—how she had found out Sid was a pervert. While she seemed to doze in the seat next to me, my mind sought out every possible scenario.
    Did she slip into the studio one day when nobody was home? Pick the lock? Sneak around, sweating, scared to death that Sid was going to come in and find her, but riveted to the horror she was finding?
    Or did she know about it for months? Overhear conversations? Happen on it in an e-mail? Pick up the extension phone on an incriminating conversation?
    There was one possibility that I didn’t want to go to—except that it niggled at me. Was Reggie right? Had Sid taken nude photos of her, his still-forming adolescent daughter?
    I glanced at her again. Was she closing her eyes against humiliation she couldn’t bear?
    I looked down at my hands, which had formed a death grip