“We’re sisters,” I said. “We’ll be in contact. I just — I don’t know what it looks like going forward. I don’t know if there’s a version of our relationship that works after this.”
“There might be,” Sam said. “People come back from worse.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Not right away.”
“That’s fair,” he said.
I’d been doing a lot of not-right-away thinking. Not right away meaning: I needed time to figure out what the relationship was now, what I wanted from it, what was realistic to expect. Not cutting her off entirely — we had shared history and a shared loss and she was going to be a presence in my life regardless. But not pretending that what had happened had not happened, not absorbing it into the family’s long tradition of letting things go unaddressed.
Somewhere between those two options was the version of things I was trying to find.
## Six Months After
My father had been dead for six months when I went back to the city for the first time.
There was no reason to go back, technically. The house had sold. The estate was closed. But I found myself booking a flight anyway, not for any practical reason, just because I wasn’t done with the place.
I drove past the house. Someone new was living there — you could tell by the different welcome mat, the plant on the porch that hadn’t been there before. The neighbors had a new car in the driveway. The street looked completely the same and entirely different, which is the only way streets look when the person you associated with them is gone.