She started crying.
“I was so mean to you,” she said. “Our whole lives. And you know what the worst part is? I don’t even know why. Mom was mean to you, so I was mean to you. That was it. That was the whole reason. I just did what she did.”
I looked at my sister. Really looked. For the first time, maybe ever, she wasn’t smirking. She was just a thirty-two-year-old woman standing in a hallway with a check.
“Do you want to come in?” I said.
She blinked. “What?”
“Daniel made chili. There’s too much. Come in.”
She stood there for a long moment.
Then she came in.
She stayed until eleven o’clock. We didn’t fix everything. You can’t fix twenty-nine years in one night. But we talked. Really talked. At one point she laughed at something Daniel said, a real laugh, and I realized I had never heard my sister laugh without it being at me.
