She said she needed to think, and she would call me back. She hung up. I sat at my kitchen table for a while, looking at the project timelines I had not reviewed, and tried to figure out how I had ended up here.
## The Sister I Grew Up With
Claire and I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, the two daughters of Diane and Frank Bennett. My father died when I was twenty-two and Claire was fifteen, a car accident on I-76 on a January morning, and that loss reorganized our family in ways that none of us have ever fully articulated but that have shaped everything since.
I was the one who kept things together in the immediate aftermath. That’s not me taking credit for anything remarkable; it’s just what happened. I was in my last semester of college, I came home, and I helped my mother handle the things that needed to be handled because someone had to. Claire was fifteen and in high school and needed to be fifteen and in high school. I made calls. I dealt with paperwork. I went back to school in March and finished my degree and got my first job and moved to a city and built a life.
Claire and I were close in the way that sisters can be close despite a significant age gap and significant differences in temperament: not always in contact, not always understanding each other, but with an underlying assumption of loyalty that I think we both took for granted in a way that was perhaps not as well-founded as I had believed.