The Eye Unseen Read Online Free

don’t have to glare at me like that. I’m not the one responsible for your problems.”
    Brandy put the brush on the top of her dresser, wrapping her arms around my shoulders in a giant bear hug. I felt her lips kiss the side of my head and watched our reflection in the mirror. My sister stared straight back at me, her embrace growing tighter.
    “Or am I?” she whispered.
    I pushed her off me, knocking the chair backward as I jumped up.
    “Jeez, Luce, I was only kidding. Lighten up! I know she’s got you stressed out, but I’m on your side, remember?”
     

 
     
     
     
Chapter 2
     
     
     
    Joan
     
    No one in my family had crimson hair.
    You fought me for twenty-one hours, and when you finally arrived I saw nothing but your red hair coated in all that muck. Never have I felt such horror.
    When you started crying, I did the same. The nurses thought I was just exhausted, and maybe that was part of it. Looking at you I couldn’t help but shriek. I begged them to take you away, and they did, for a few hours. What I had really wanted was for them to make you disappear.
    But Brandy fell in love with you.
    “Mommy, she looks like Christmas,” Brandy told me when the staff let her visit.
    She had been excited to be an older sister. For my entire pregnancy I had gorged on fear and could barely get out of bed, I missed poor Alex so much. But Brandy had planned for everything. She drew a hundred pictures of what the new baby might look like, made up names, and told everyone in town that you were on the way. When we went shopping for baby things, I told her what I needed and she ran around, filling the cart while I stood behind it, not even double checking what she picked out.
    I couldn’t nurse you, didn’t really want you near me at all. The staff brought you to my room, but it was Brandy who fed you. I just lay on the bed, staring at Alex’s daughter, then following her eyes down to you.
    No one in our family had red hair. I knew this wasn’t a coincidence. You were everything I’d been raised to fear. Cunning, even at birth, like Satan himself, your tiny dimples a constant reminder of the fiend I was born to bear.
    Where were the women in my family when I needed them the most? They had been quick to condemn me as a child, blame me for what was yet to come. But now that you had arrived, set their ancient fears in motion, none of them were left to help me.
    Not even Mother.
    I would have left you in the hospital if Brandy hadn’t taken to you so fast. She and I were a team, and I hated to let her down. If you hadn’t come out covered in all that hair I might have shared her delight, but instead I fought through my revulsion just to hold you and faked enjoyment at birthing a second daughter.
    The nurses called it postpartum depression. I called it postpartum terror.
    Brandy mothered you while I prayed for my own mother, dead since the moment of your conception, to help me. She would have known what to do. My mother would have taken care of everything for me, just let me lay back and close my eyes while she dusted it all under the rug.
    How I missed her. Missed all of them.
    Alex most of all.
    In the end I brought you back to our apartment. Dutifully I smiled while the neighbors kissed the top of your head and told me what a beautiful child you were. I nodded, I laughed, I did everything a mother is supposed to do.
    “What’s her name?” people asked.
    “Lucy!” Brandy said proudly.
    She hadn’t been there when the nurses named you. Brandy had still been safe with Mrs. Belast, the secretary of our church, when the doctor raised you as they cut that damned cord that bound us together.
    “Lucifer!” I had shouted, my voice muffled under your first cries for air.
    The nurses had started calling you Lucy right away. Although Dr. Smythe had certainly understood my cry, his helpers had only heard the first half of your name.
    “Lucinda,” the blonde nurse had said. “What a pretty name.”
    And so you became