Part One – The Gift
Have you ever received a gift from someone you loved, a gift that was supposed to be a small piece of happiness, only for it to become the beginning of a tragedy that tore your life apart? I have. And the scar it left on me will probably never fade in this lifetime.
My name is Sophia. I’m thirty years old, and I’ve been married to my husband, Matthew, for almost three years. We live on the coast of Connecticut, in a well‑off suburb not far from New Haven, where the Atlantic wind always smells faintly of salt and rain.
The house has three other occupants: my mother‑in‑law, Helen; my husband, Matt; and his younger sister, Clare. On the surface, we’re like many other families in this part of the United States. My in‑laws are not billionaires, but they’re among the most well‑to‑do families in our area of coastal Connecticut.
The house is large, bright, and tastefully furnished. If you glanced at us from the outside, you might have thought: what a fortunate daughter‑in‑law she must be. You would have been wrong.
Everything in this house would have been normal if it weren’t for the extraordinarily special presence of my sister‑in‑law. Clare is five years younger than I am. She has a fragile, almost smoke‑like beauty—translucent pale skin, long dark hair, and big eyes that always look on the verge of tears.
Her fragility is not just in her appearance, but also, I was told, in her body. My mother‑in‑law has repeated the story so many times I could recite it by heart: since childhood, Clare has suffered from a strange condition, an extreme allergy to most common fabrics. According to Helen, if even a single foreign fiber touches Clare’s skin, she could break out in rashes, struggle to breathe, and even suffer seizures.
Because of this, the entire family treats her as if she were made of porcelain. Everything in the house that might come into contact with her—her clothes, her bed sheets, her blankets—must be custom‑ordered from a special type of silk. The fabric is incredibly expensive and hard to find, imported and handled like treasure.
The rest of us, of course, make do with ordinary cotton and polyester. My life in that house has been a long sequence of days filled with patience and restraint. Helen is a sharp, authoritarian woman who loves her daughter with a blind, fierce intensity.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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