The Good Sister — Louise Moeri

Completely absorbed in the wreckage of her own life that has smashed her family and catapulted her into panic attacks, Sarah Wingate flees to her childhood home in Oregon and her older sister, Julia. Sarah's plan, suggested by her psychiatrist, is to rest and regain her balance emotionally after the failure of her marriage, recover from her panic attacks, and then return to California to put together a home for herself and her children.
When she arrives at the old homestead she finds Julia, as usual, reserved and apparently strong. Julia, she recalls, was always the ‘good sister' when they were children, and she, Sarah, was the impulsive, irresponsible ‘bad sister'. Julia welcomes Sarah, who settles in for her ‘rest', even though at the outset she begins to feel uneasy as she sees odd, unexplained things about the old family ranch. She recognizes that returning to the old house will bring back terrible memories of her bizarre and unstable parents. Since they are both dead now, however, Sarah feels she should be able to recover unhindered by those memories.
Julia, in the meantime, is suppressing her own terrifying emotional wounds in her drive to rescue her younger sister. Julia conceals the fact that she had been planning to kill herself, unable to bear any longer her burdens of grief and guilt. Sarah realizes that the strong ‘good sister' she thought to lean on was in desperate need of nurturing. Can she discover strength and purpose in herself and rebuild their lives? No more good sister or bad sister?