"Yes. Yes, your room at our father's house was like that."
"And... my bed was in the corner opposite to the door."
"Yes."
"I just had a memory of... me crying under the bed covers. You... walked into my bedroom, but a man... I think it was our father, he told you to leave me alone."
"Oh..."
She stays silent for a little while and I hear her close a laptop.
"That's... after Father brought you home. You really cried a lot and I would hear you when I went to the bathroom. Our father is a strict man. He didn't like seeing me out of my bed, for any reason at all."
"Yeah, he didn't seem... very concerned."
"No. I told you, he's not really the... doting type."
She sounds almost sorry, and it makes me smile. If anything, I'm happier to learn that Amy was more concerned about the crying Clarissa than she was sad about our douche of a father.
"It's fine, I'm not really surprised at this point."
"Do you remember anything else?"
"There was a meal with our father, but it wasn't very... happy. You weren't there. Also, I remember when I... asked you to help me apply to the university here."
"Yes, like I told you, it was the first time you reached out to me to ask me for anything."
I nod, although she can't see it. Clarissa probably didn't give her more details about her reasons, it sounded like Amy helped without asking too much. There's still one thing I need to ask though.
"...Amy, did you know I was sick?"
She stays silent for a long while. It can't be that she didn't know. It would explain a lot, about basically everything. Even her reactions at the hospital, how she was being over protective of me. Will she lie? I wait, even checking if she might have hung up at some point but I can hear her breathing, very faintly.
"...I didn't know until your accident."
"How so?"
"You had put me as your emergency contact so they called me when it happened. I flew over and was taken to the Emergency Room and so on. When I did the papers for your admissions though, I saw your health records..."
So Amy really had no idea until then, as I suspected. Clarissa did one hell of a good job in hiding so much from her older sister... She hid that she was sick, probably terminally ill, and she flew to Silver City under false pretenses too. Of course. If Amy had known about her health issues, she probably wouldn't have let her... I mean let us fly here.
"I thought there was a mistake," she continued, "so I called our family doctor, and she confessed everything."
"Amy, what did she say?"
"...You had a strange form of lung cancer and lymphoma. Not only that, but your organs were failing one after the other. As if your body was destroying itself from the inside. You also had some form of blood disease. Our family doctor said you... refused to be treated and refused any medication."
It does sound like Clarissa dismissed all the concerns of the people around her. The few that actually cared about her. Why, though? Did she really not care about dying? Or did she know there would be a way to survive...? I hear Amy walking on the other end of the phone and some coffee machine running.
"I called Father, to ask if he knew," she sighs. "I couldn't believe our family doctor wouldn't have told him at least."
"He knew, didn't he?"
"Yes. I... I fought with him over the phone."
Wait, what? She fought with that stiff father of ours? For my, or Clarissa's sake? I'm shocked. I had felt like Amy was the most implicated but I never thought she'd go that far. She had said so herself she really didn't care much about her father...
"Really?"
