Chapter 30

The letter came on a Tuesday in September.

Sandy almost didn’t open it. She didn’t recognize the return address — a street in Millbrook she didn’t know, a name she hadn’t seen written in years. Her sister’s handwriting on the envelope, careful and slightly cramped, the way it had always been.

She sat with it at the kitchen table for a long moment before she opened it.

Yuki was at the counter. She saw Sandy’s face and came and sat beside her without asking.

Sandy read it twice. Then she set it flat on the table and looked at the window.

The letter was two pages, handwritten, the kind of letter that had clearly been started and abandoned and started again — there were places where the pen pressure changed, where the sentences had the careful quality of words chosen after a long time of sitting with the wrong ones.

Her sister’s name was Michelle. She was nineteen now. She was living with their mother’s sister, Aunt Celeste, in a town three hours away. She had been thinking, she wrote, since the funeral. Since standing at the graveside and looking across at Sandy — at the woman beside Sandy, Yoko, who had her arm around Sandy’s shoulders and was clearly someone who knew how to be there — and understanding, for the first time and too late, what she had failed to be.

She wrote that she had not been kind. She wrote that she had not noticed. She wrote that she had told herself Sandy was fine, that Sandy didn’t need anything, that Sandy was just quiet — and she understood now that these were the things she had told herself so she wouldn’t have to do anything.

She was sorry. She knew sorry didn’t fix anything. She wasn’t asking for anything. She just needed Sandy to know that she saw it now, what she had done and not done, and that she was sorry for all of it.

She hoped Sandy was happy. She could see, from the funeral, that Sandy had people. Real ones. She was glad.

She signed it simply: Michelle.

Sandy read it a third time.

Then she folded it carefully and set it on the table and sat with it.