They Left Me to Drown: A Family's Regret

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The beam kept coming closer.

Strength surged up from somewhere I didn't know I had, and I kicked with everything in my legs, breaking the surface toward the light, coughing hard.

I spat out mouthful after mouthful of muddy rainwater and gulped down air, both hands clamped tight around a drifting plank.

It was Sebastian.

He sat in a plastic kayak he'd borrowed on the fly, a flashlight in one hand, paddling this way along the current.

When he saw me surface, his hands paused, then he steered the kayak over beside me.

I wiped the water off my face, tipped my head up at him, my voice weak but full of hope. "Sebastian…"

My heart was pounding, tears and rain running together.

Mom and Dad might favor June, but Sebastian was the one person I loved.

He'd come back after all. He still had me in his heart.

But before I could even reach my hand out, Sebastian frowned.

He didn't reach down to pull me up. Instead he swept the flashlight beam back and forth around me, his voice openly frantic.

"Letitia, did you see June's bracelet? The one I gave her for her twentieth birthday. It was so crowded when she boarded, she said she thinks she dropped it around here."

For that one moment, the wind and rain seemed to vanish from my ears.

I heard what Sebastian was truly thinking.

【June's crying so hard at the shelter she can barely breathe. That bracelet means everything to her. Letitia swims well, why isn't she helping look already! Making trouble in the middle of the night. If it isn't found, June won't sleep a wink tonight.】

My hand, still out in the air, slowly dropped back down.

So he hadn't come to save me. He'd come to help June find her bracelet.

"I didn't see it." I heard my own voice come out flat, with no rise or fall, cold as the downpour swallowing the sky.

Sebastian slapped the paddle against the water, irritated, and looked down at me from above.

"You swim so well, can't you dive down and feel around for her? How heavy can one bracelet be? June's not strong, she can't take being upset like this. Letitia, you're the older sister. How can you be so small-minded? You'll pick a fight with her over a little thing like this?"

The moment he finished, he didn't wait for an answer. He turned the kayak around and paddled off toward the deeper water.

The flashlight beam slid off me and threw me back into the endless dark.

That was when the memories came roaring back to tear at me.

I thought of the day Sebastian proposed, the way he slid the ring onto my finger and kissed my forehead so gently.

That night I found a receipt in his pocket.

The diamond ring he bought me was twenty thousand. The same day, he'd bought June a custom necklace worth sixty thousand.

When I asked him why, he laughed and ruffled my hair and said June was the younger sister, delicate, and it was only right to spoil her a little more.

So every bit of the favoritism had left its trail all along.

What they called doting on me was only the fig leaf they tossed my way to cover the fact that their hearts had always leaned somewhere else.

The current turned savage all at once. The floodgates upstream must have opened wide, and the churning brown waves came at me like some huge beast.

My plank shattered in an instant, and my body was dragged back into the rapids.

Just as I was about to go under again, a megaphone crackled to life somewhere far off.

"Letitia! Letitia!"

It was my brother Elmer Swanson's voice, a thread of urgency in it.