Their doll 2

66- Rose

I didn't realize how wide I was grinning until that very moment. Thanks, mom.

**********************

It was later that night. My face muscles and throat hurt from how much I had been smiling and laughing. I hardly touched the food on my plate. Not that it didn't taste good. It's just everyone seemed to have so much to say and it's never like that around here.

My family. They had never been this alive and talkative.

Six months ago, when Rosalie made her first appearance. Or should I say, reappearance. I thought our family would never be the same ever again. I was furious with my parents first of all. Thinking how could they do this to me, hiding such a big secret and for so long.

Seven years ago, I was tricked into believing that my one and only sister had passed away. She was sick. At least, that's what father and mother told me. I was rarely home and I was at the age where socializing was everything. I was trying to gain more connections, knowing I were to inherit all that my father has one day.

Soon after I learned that our family was no longer a family of four but three, I started living my life with this empty void feeling.

I lost my sister.

Had no idea she didn't die, but ran away. The true story did make no sense to me at first, and I was mad at everyone including Rosalie when I found out.

But within a month I spent, isolating from everyone, especially my own family whom I saw for the time being was thinking only of me, worrying about me and not so much of the fact that Rosalie had just returned home, so it was perhaps no wonder that she ran away from us in the first place.

Now, six months in and I had no idea how we went from that to this. While the longing and the sadness, the anger and the vexation would never completely go away, but it truly did become less painful once you allowed yourself to feel. To grieve and then get over. Everyone, at different pace, had their own way of establishing and adjusting to new environment.

Nobody wants to linger in the past for so long.

Yet as much as I still do think of her, a reuniting with Rosalie after seven years had taught me.

Don't lose yourself just because you've found somebody.

*******************

"You didn't have to drop me off, brother."

I looked over at my sister who was sitting beside me in the passenger seat, gesturing with her hand toward the window.

"You could park right over there. There is an empty spot." She urged, hurriedly.

I turned my attention back to the road.

"Relax, Rose. I doubt your friends will ever make fun of you for riding in a three-hundred thousand-dollar Ferrari." I teased and heard she mumble something I couldn't understand before speak aloud.

"It's not like that." She sighed, looking just a little too unsettling.

Out of the corners of my eyes, I caught her nervously tapping her fingers against her denim-clad leg. She was on edge. I took a quick glance at her.