Branch: Splintered Edges (Erin, Marissa, Norah)

The city outside pressed in on all sides, its late-night glow filtered through gray clouds and spattered rain, its noise sealed out by cheap double glazing and a single, stubborn orchid drooping above the ledge. Even from the corridor, Erin recognized the signature of the place: the smell of stale coffee and turpentine, the faint rot of too-damp earth, the quiet hum of a window fan three years out of warranty. Liesa’s loft was both fortress and mausoleum—a living space whose every wall carried evidence of the girl who lived there, and every corner the evidence of what she’d lost.

Inside, the lights were mostly out. A handful of LED candles shivered in the gloom, painting the edges of posters, old ticket stubs, and hundreds of sketches. The walls were a chaos of faces, bodies, hands holding other hands. Birds in flight, lovers kissing, children fighting sleep on car rides into dusk. Each sheet was pinned or taped, sometimes layered three deep, as though the artist had run out of world to document and was now recycling the old one. It should have been beautiful; instead, Erin felt a chill. This was not decoration. It was proof of life clinging to itself by its fingernails.

In the middle of it, on a futon half-collapsed under the weight of unwashed bedding and notebooks, sat Liesa. The real one. Not the girl from college, not the bright-eyed wanderer of Erin’s memory, but a grown woman nearly doubled over in the effort of pretending she hadn’t been crying. A cheap wine bottle stood sentry at her feet, its label slashed by a bored fingernail, a band-aid wrapped around the stem like a makeshift tourniquet. Her head rested against her knees, shoulders trembling.

Erin hovered in the doorway, waiting for the permission that would never come. The room offered none. Every molecule ached with the sense that to move or speak was to risk collapse of something more delicate than glass. Liesa didn’t look up, didn’t register the presence of anyone. She was all the way inside herself, every inch barricaded.

The phone in her hand illuminated her face—sallow, more shadow than skin. For a long time, Liesa just stared at it. Erin saw her thumb scroll, hesitate, then tap out a message, one letter at a time.

Andy, it’s Liesa. I’m sorry. I never left because of you.

The screen’s blue-white light lit the room in pulses, as if every word was a tiny act of CPR. Liesa read the text, erased it, started again.

Andy, I never told you the truth. I wasn’t brave enough. I was scared you’d hate me for how small and cowardly I’d become.

Backspace, again and again, the words growing shorter and more **** with each revision.

It’s me. I’m sorry.

That was all she could manage, in the end. For a long time, she just looked at it, thumb hovering over the send button. Erin could feel the pressure, the actual physics of the choice being made: If she sent it, the story would change, time would restart, maybe forgiveness would trickle in by morning. But that wasn’t how this worked, not for either of them. Erin knew it too well.

Liesa pressed delete. Not the gentle kind, not the backspace-by-backspace erasure, but the nuclear option—the button that made the whole thing disappear. The screen went black, and Liesa crumpled around it, her body suddenly emptied of all tension. A faint whimper, then nothing. Not the full-body sobs of children or the angry, showy wails of someone who wanted to be comforted. This was the leak of air from a balloon already flattened by a week in the sun. All that effort, and not even enough energy left to hate herself for it.

Erin stepped inside, shoes silent on the worn parquet, and took a seat on the far edge of the futon. She watched the entire process in profile, her own heart ricocheting between anger and something like awe. She wanted to reach out, to break the quarantine, but she knew it would be wrong. She’d tried that, once, with her own mother. The only thing it got her was an old scar on the palm and a deep distrust of anyone who said “It’s okay to talk about it.”

So she said nothing. She let Liesa cry in silence, let her grip the wine bottle tight, let her knuckles go bloodless and her shoulders sag forward and her throat squeeze out nothing but raw air. Erin sat there, hands folded, and kept her own voice on a leash.

It was several minutes before Liesa moved again. She set the phone face-down on the mattress, wiped her nose with the sleeve of an oversized hoodie, and blinked at the far wall. Her eyes, rimmed in red, tracked over each sketch and every layer of memory stapled to the plaster. There was a drawing of Andy, younger and softer than Erin remembered, his eyes wide with a kind of hope that now seemed fictional. There was one of a child (maybe Liesa herself) standing ankle-deep in the North Sea, hair blown straight out by the wind. Next to it, a ballpoint rendering of a hospital bed, the sheets twisted, the windows black.

Erin followed the gaze, saw where it landed, and understood. Even the things you love become evidence against you, if you let them.

For a long time, neither spoke. The only sounds were the distant slap of rain on the window and the city’s after-midnight lull. Erin thought of every time she’d chosen to suffer in silence, every time she’d let someone else’s need drown her own because the alternative was worse. She thought of Andy—how he’d always been the last to speak, the first to forgive, the one who patched every rift even when it cost him everything. She wondered what it would mean to actually break that pattern.

Liesa exhaled, slow and deliberate. She pulled the hood up over her head, then let her whole body list sideways until she lay curled on the bed, knees tucked tight, arms wrapped around her chest. The phone slipped to the floor, its battery now dead. With nothing left to distract her, the sobs returned—softer, but now steady, as if her heart was finally in on the joke.

Erin waited. Then, when it was clear that there would be no more words, she leaned in close enough that her voice might reach. She spoke as if to herself, but aimed the words straight at the broken place in front of her.

“You think silence is love,” Erin said, voice low and careful. “But it’s just fear. He deserves to know. You deserve to tell him.”

Liesa didn’t respond. Maybe she couldn’t, maybe she wouldn’t. But the way her shoulders jerked said she’d heard.

Erin kept going, gentle but relentless, the way she’d always wanted someone to do for her. “You don’t get extra points for suffering alone. There’s no reward for shutting up and taking it. All you’re doing is making the pain permanent, for you and for him. That’s not noble. That’s just lonely.”

The tears, if anything, got worse. Erin found herself fighting to stay dry-eyed, but it was impossible; Liesa’s grief was a sinkhole, and no one could resist it forever. The only way through was to let it pass over both of them.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” she finished. “But I’m here. If you need me.”

She could see the words register. Liesa’s hand flinched, the way a dog’s might when you reach for it after it’s been struck too many times. For a second, Erin thought she’d pull away entirely, retreat into herself so deep there’d be nothing left but sketches and dust. But instead, Liesa’s fist unclenched, just a little, and her breathing slowed.

In the silence that followed, Erin let herself look around again. She took in the clutter, the old food wrappers, the plants that needed watering, the collage of lives abandoned or put on hold. It was all so damn familiar.

She reached for the wine bottle, lifted it, and took a single swig, her eyes never leaving the back of Liesa’s hood. It tasted like battery acid and old tears. She set it down, closer to Liesa’s hand, a silent offering.

Then she just sat there, as the minutes ticked by and the light grew more gray than black. She watched as Liesa’s body finally unwound, as the crying slowed and then stopped, as the world drifted back into something like normal. There would be no closure tonight. Not for years, not until The HH. But at least there were two of them, in the dark, instead of just one.

The loft dissolved in stages—not all at once, but in pieces, as though being unmade by careful hands. The walls peeled back first, sketches curling into nothing. The futon softened into fog. Liesa's hunched form became translucent, then a suggestion, then memory. Erin remained seated in the diminishing space, watching it go, her chest still tight from what she'd witnessed and what she'd said. When the last of the city's rain-sound faded, she was standing in the Garden of Glass, her bare feet on the thrumming floor, the mirrors humming their gentle resonance around her.

The darkness pressed less heavily than before. She could see further—or perhaps the garden had simply contracted, drawn the pillars closer in their loose spirals. Condensation beaded on the glass sentinels like sweat, catching the faint luminescence that now emanated from within them. A blue light refracted somewhere beyond the fog, brief and distant, as if someone had passed with a lantern she couldn't quite reach. The mirror fragments tilted toward her as she moved through them, a subtle reorientation, as though the entire labyrinth had leaned in to listen. Some of the larger shards showed faint movement—shadows that weren't hers, passing behind the glass like fish in dark water.

One fragment ahead of her flashed with a high, clear note. Erin moved toward it, her breathing still uneven from the weight of Liesa's silence and the words she'd **** into the dark. She heard whispers layering over the hum: "she said… she said it would get better," someone breathed, and beneath it, "Andy, you need to learn how to rule!" And further still, a fragment that sounded almost like "I’m so stupid."—phrases that belonged to no memory she'd just entered, though she couldn't place where they'd come from. She reached out and touched the flashing mirror. Her hand was steady, though her heart was not.

The Moreno kitchen was built for warmth. Even on nights like this, when the streetlights outside flickered over fog and the wind rattled the garden gate, the room glowed with its own remembered sunlight. The table, battered by three generations of elbows, was set with four mismatched placemats; a line of baby photos ran along the wall above the counter, their edges curled and yellowed. The air was thick with cilantro, garlic, and the slow, rolling undertone of pork fat rendered on a back burner. Marissa took all this in as she crossed the threshold, the linoleum cold beneath her feet, the ceiling light softened by a lampshade trimmed with tissue paper flowers.

Dawn stood at the counter, chin tucked and brow furrowed in concentration. Her hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, black as the cumin seeds she pinched between two fingers. She wore a faded t-shirt that read “Doubt Kills More Dreams Than Failure Ever Will,” its hem tucked into a polka-dot apron several sizes too big. In front of her, the recipe card—her grandmother’s handwriting, neat and curlicued—was propped against a jar of beans. Every ingredient had been measured and arrayed with military precision: onions chopped fine, peppers blistered and stripped of skin, dough rolled into neat, plastic-wrapped bundles.

Marissa watched from the doorway as Dawn assembled each step with the nervous diligence of a scientist hoping for a miracle. She moved as if watched by a jury of ghosts, her hands quick but uncertain, her shoulders hitched toward her ears. The house around her was nearly silent. From the next room came the low, muffled report of a Sunday-night football game, a distant shout that might have been a cheer or an argument. But here, in the kitchen, Dawn was alone. There was only the sound of the wooden spoon clinking in the bowl, the intermittent sigh of the fridge cycling on and off, and the hush of water boiling on the stove.

Halfway through, Dawn faltered. She picked up the card and squinted at a line written in faint blue ink. Her lips moved, tracing the words, but her face lost focus—first confusion, then mounting dread. She set the card down, flipped it over, and ran her finger along the bottom margin as though expecting a secret annotation to appear. Nothing.

The dough in her hands sagged, the edges melting together in a way that betrayed her inexperience. Dawn frowned, then tried to recover: she pressed, folded, shaped, but each effort only made the result look more alien. She kept glancing at the card, as if the missing step might be conjured by sheer will. A soundless “fuck” slipped out as the masa stuck to her palm, refusing to behave.

Marissa recognized the moment the memory became unbearable. Dawn’s movements grew more frantic, her breathing choppy. She dropped the spoon, letting it clatter to the laminate, and braced both hands flat on the countertop. For a long, silent minute she simply stood there, head bowed, the lines of her body drawing inward like a plant shying from cold. The kitchen was suddenly too small to contain the magnitude of the loss.

Marissa stepped forward. For a heartbeat Dawn’s shoulders tensed, like she was preparing for impact. Marissa stopped beside her, just close enough to share breath, to be unmistakably present.

She looked down at the recipe card: abuela’s looping script, the years of splattered oil and eraser marks, a single stain the color of saffron bleeding through the paper’s center. It had survived decades of use, hundreds of holidays. And now, with the final keeper of the tradition gone, it was all that remained.

“Hey,” Marissa said, her voice a hush. She reached out and rested her hand lightly over Dawn’s, anchoring her to the counter, to the moment. The girl flinched—then, when she realized it was not a correction or a demand, just contact, she let out a breath.

“It’s missing,” Dawn whispered, on the edge of panic. “She always did something with the filling. She’d say ‘just a pinch, just a pinch,’ but she never wrote it down.” Her jaw trembled, and she fought to keep the emotion from her voice. “I’ve made these a hundred times with her, but I always watched her hands instead of asking. And now I can’t remember. I can’t ask.”

Marissa squeezed gently. “That’s not your fault,” she said. “No one ever writes it all down. Some things just—go, when the person goes.”

Dawn’s knuckles whitened. “But it was the only thing that tasted like home. If I mess it up, it’s gone for good.”

The silence that followed was loaded, as if the kitchen itself was holding its breath.

Marissa kept her hand there, the warmth seeping in. She thought of her own grandmother, the slow erosion of memory after the stroke, the final years spent speaking in riddles that made sense only after the funeral. She thought of her sister, the way each day since childhood had been a fight to keep from vanishing into irrelevance. She thought of Andy, the last time she’d seen him in her office, his eyes hollowed out by loss and exhaustion, waiting for her to say something that could reverse the entropy of his world. There was nothing that could—only this, the witness, the refusal to look away.

“I know it’s not the same,” Marissa said, “but if you want, I can help. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes sees what the old ones miss.”

Dawn swallowed, hard. She nodded, and together they leaned over the card, reading the steps aloud. Marissa pointed to the space between “combine filling ingredients” and “wrap in dough.” The gap was palpable, a ghost step. Dawn stared at it, jaw set.

“She used to taste it,” Dawn said, the memory shaking loose. “Every time, she’d make a tiny ball and taste it before moving on. She said the dough ‘listens’ to your mood.” She smiled, watery. “If you were impatient or angry, it would turn out tough. If you were gentle, it would melt.”

Marissa grinned, and Dawn’s smile caught, held. “Try it,” Marissa urged.

With a trembling hand, Dawn pinched off a bit of the dough, rolled it, and tasted. She chewed, eyes closed, and for a second she was somewhere else—another kitchen, another year, another time she hadn’t understood would be the last. She opened her eyes and wiped them on her sleeve.

“It needs more salt,” she said, voice clearing. “And—” She closed her eyes, searching her memory for the shape of her grandmother’s hands, the rhythm of her movements. “And a little bit of the orange rind. I always forget that part.”

She grated zest into the bowl, laughing through her tears. “She used to say it makes the whole house taste like sunlight.” She worked the dough again, the energy of the room shifting, her posture less weighted. Marissa stayed beside her, not directing, just present, anchoring the process with silent affirmation.

When the filling was ready and the first batch assembled, Dawn set the tray in the oven, then turned to face Marissa. “Thank you,” she said, eyes shining. “For being here. For reminding me it’s okay to—miss her.”

Marissa nodded, her own eyes damp. “She’s not really gone, you know. As long as you remember. As long as you keep making these, and keep telling the stories, she’s here.”

Dawn’s smile faltered, then steadied. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, she is.”

They stood in the kitchen, the silence now gentle, alive with the anticipation of bread rising, of stories continuing. The first trace of orange and pork filled the room. Outside, the city’s sounds faded under the soft thrum of home.

As the world resumed its pace, Marissa looked at Dawn, and saw not just a girl piecing together her heritage, but a survivor building a bridge over the river of loss. It was not the absence that defined her, but the stubborn, daily act of remembering.

The oven beeped, and Dawn moved to check her work. Marissa stayed at the table, tracing the recipe card’s lines, the handwriting looping into infinity. She felt, for the first time in a long while, that the act of comfort was not just for the other. It was for herself as well. The ache of what she’d lost—her own mother, her old certainties, the neat boundaries of what she was allowed to feel—softened. She breathed in the scent of cilantro and orange, and allowed herself to believe that, maybe, nothing was truly lost forever.

In the kitchen, Dawn laughed, the sound raw and real. “It’s better,” she called over her shoulder. “I think I got it right this time.”

Marissa smiled. “I never doubted you,” she said.

For a little while, the house was full: of laughter, of memory, of things that could not be written down, but would always find their way home. For a little while, Dawn's grandmother lived again, and Marissa felt everything would be allright.

Marissa opened her eyes to the Garden of Glass: the mirrors humming their gentle resonance, the pillars faintly luminous, the darkness less suffocating than before. The fog was warm now—almost welcoming—and as she steadied herself, she noticed the larger mirror fragments had tilted slightly, as if turning toward her in acknowledgment. A flashing shard caught her attention, its surface smooth and waiting. She took a breath, steadied her shoulders, and listened to the whispers layering over the hum: "I used to get panic attacks at night," and "—she's not really gone—" and beneath them, a younger voice she didn't recognize: "Thank you for today." Blue light refracted briefly through the fog—a lantern, or the memory of one—and somewhere in the darkness beyond the pillars, a shadow moved, slow and deliberate. Marissa moved toward the flashing shard, her footsteps resonating against the thrumming floor, feeling the mirrors' attention follow her like open eyes.

The walls of Erin's apartment were the color of bruised peaches in half-light, as if even the paint was too proud to show its wounds. Norah entered, expecting mess—plants in various stages of neglect, shoes abandoned in piles, water glasses collecting their own quiet civilizations—but the space was surprisingly ordered. Every object in the room had been arranged to look unarranged. On the sill, a mason jar cupped the tangled roots of a pothos clipping, trying and failing to thrive. Near the door, a trail runner caked in red clay waited for its pair. The only overt sign of entropy was the scattering of cat toys beneath the couch, like evidence left at the scene of a crime.

The cat appeared first: a small, obese calico with a one-eyed glare and the gatekeeping instinct of a TSA agent. She stationed herself between Norah and the couch, tail swishing, daring approach. Her tag named her Fluffernutter. Norah considered trying a bribe, then let the standoff stand. Above, on a shelf nailed crookedly to the wall, a series of succulents soldiered through their remaining days. The air was shot through with the hum of a dehumidifier, the distant rattle of pipes, and the rain that smeared everything beyond the window into a gray smear.

Norah walked further in, following the sound of the phone. It rang with a frequency that managed to be both ordinary and catastrophic, like a pulse too regular to belong to a dying body. The couch was gray, the color of an old T-shirt, and shaped by years of surrender. Erin sat curled on it, knees up, hands cupped around a mug that clearly used to belong to someone else (“Best Grandpa Ever!”). She didn't answer the phone on the first ring, or the second. It was the fourth ring that broke her, and when she picked up the handset—landline, not cell, because of course Erin still kept a landline—her voice came out a full octave higher than usual, all pretense of confidence leached away.

“Hello?”

The silence that followed was so long Norah wondered if the call had dropped. Then, a voice: “Sis?”

Erin’s fingers tightened on the mug, the knuckles going white. “Hey,” she said, “what’s up?”

On the other end: “You said to call if it got bad.”

Erin’s breath caught. “Yeah. I did.”

“It's bad,” Steve said. “It’s really fucking bad, Erin. I—” The voice broke, all the way down to the cartilage, and when it came back up, it sounded like the speaker had to reconstruct himself from the rubble. “I know you’re busy. I know. But I just… I didn’t know who else to call.”

A deep inhale, the air on both ends of the line vibrating with things neither sibling would ever say. Erin stared straight ahead, not blinking, as if willing herself to survive the next minute by simple inertia. On the shelf, a cactus let go of one of its arms, the limb dropping to the dirt with a soft thud.

“Mom’s at it again,” Steve said. “She’s going off about the money, about the inheritance, about Dad’s goddamn truck, and I just—” The words tangled, tripped, then gave up entirely. “I’m sorry. You don’t need this. You don’t.”

Erin closed her eyes, the lids glowing with the bleed-through of memory. “No, it’s okay,” she said, the voice trained now, almost soothing. “What do you need?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “I just wanted—fuck, I don’t even know what I wanted. Maybe for you to just… say it’s going to be fine? Or that I’m not crazy? I just—shit—” The sound of a hand smacking a tabletop. “Can you come home for a weekend? Just… for a day? She’ll listen to you. Or at least she’ll shut up for a few hours.”

The old Erin—Erin before Andy, Erin before the breakup, Erin before she’d built her life out of avoidance—would have said yes. Norah saw it, in the way her mouth fought to form the syllable, the way her hands flexed open and closed like something alive in them wanted out. But she didn’t say yes. Not right away. She pivoted, as all people do when the truth is unbearable.

“I have a field survey,” Erin said, the lie so subtle only her own brother would have heard the shift in cadence. “There’s this wetlands restoration thing, and if I bail, the grant gets pulled. It’s like, time-sensitive. But I can call you tomorrow, okay? Or even tonight, if it helps.”

Steve exhaled, the sound shaky but stabilizing. “Tomorrow’s good. Yeah. Thanks.”

Another silence, thicker this time. Then: “Love you, Sis.”

“Love you too,” Erin said, and as soon as the words were out, she hung up. She placed the phone gently in its cradle, then let her hand fall to the cat’s head. Fluffernutter permitted exactly one stroke before biting her. Erin didn’t react, just wiped her palm on her jeans and went back to staring at the window.

Norah had seen enough. She was supposed to stand here and witness, let the memory play out, but her own ribs felt like they were shrinking inward, crushing her heart into a cold, dense seed. This wasn’t new. This was every family she’d ever known, every holiday she’d spent trying to be useful, every fucking Sunday when her father would call and ask if she was eating enough, never once asking if she was happy, or if she was lonely, or if maybe she’d like to talk about anything but calories and career.

Norah wanted to shake Erin, to grab her by the shoulders and **** her to make the right call. But she knew, intimately, that there was no right call. You could only patch the wounds or let them bleed out, and either way someone was left mopping the floor.

The next beat of the memory was slow, like a film strip stuttering on a frame. Erin stood, walked to the kitchen, and began unloading the dishwasher with the efficiency of someone who’d learned not to make noise. Each plate placed in the cabinet was a tiny act of penance. Norah watched her stack bowls, align Tupperware, dry a glass with the hem of her shirt. The urge to help was a living thing in her chest, but Norah knew that to intervene would be to destroy the scene, and maybe herself.

She moved to the kitchen threshold, and the smell of lemon soap and stale coffee was so overwhelming it made her dizzy. Erin worked in silence, her face set in the mask of someone who’d survived a hundred similar conversations and knew the only way out was through. She finished the dishes, wiped the counter, then paused, both hands braced on the Formica as if holding up the house itself.

“Shit,” Erin muttered. The word hung in the air, a confession too small to matter.

And then—something unexpected: Erin turned, slid down the wall, and sat on the linoleum, back to the cabinets. She brought her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, head dropped, breathing through her teeth. For a moment, Norah thought she might cry, but instead she did something worse: she laughed. Quiet, brittle, so sharp it could cut skin.

It was the laugh of someone who had learned to find the joke in agony, and Norah hated her for it. Hated her, and loved her, and saw in her every person who had ever chosen to survive by pretending they were already dead.

Norah’s own knees buckled. She sat beside Erin, not touching, just occupying the space with her. The cat stalked away, tail up, as if disgusted by the weakness on display.

“It never gets better,” Erin said, not to Norah but to the air itself. “You can bail on your family, but the wounds just find new places to open up.” She thumped her forehead gently against her knees, a rhythm of self-punishment. “Why does it always come down to me?”

Norah tried not to hate her for it, but the feeling was a slow poison, threading up from her gut, filling her head with the static of every time she’d tried to open herself only to be met by someone else’s barricade. She’d always told herself she was above this sort of thing—resentment, judgment, the cheap thrill of superiority when you watched another person fail at their own life. But watching Erin curl up on the kitchen floor, nothing left but the sound of her own breathing, Norah wanted to scream. Wanted to claw her way through the memory, grab the girl by the shoulders, and shake her until the armor broke apart and something real tumbled out.

But that wasn’t how the world worked, and it never had been.

She remembered the first time she’d heard her own father cry: she’d been ten, the only one awake, padding through the apartment after a nightmare had torn her from sleep. She’d found him in the living room, slumped in his threadbare robe, eyes red and voice cracked open by something too big for words. He’d seen her, and instead of waving her away like usual, he’d just said, “Sorry, habibti. Baba is weak tonight.” And she’d nodded, and sat with him, and the two of them had watched the shadow play of headlights against the wall until dawn came and made it possible to pretend nothing had ever happened.

It was the only time he’d ever let her in. The next day, he’d bought donuts and made jokes about American breakfast. The crying never happened again, not in her presence, and from then on, every time she tried to reach him, there was just a little more steel in his voice, a little more distance in the way he hugged her. By the time she left for college, she could barely remember the sound of his laugh.

She wondered, now, if Erin had ever had a moment like that. If there was some distant, ruined memory of a parent, a lover, a friend who had actually let her see them hurt, and if the memory was so bright and sharp it blinded her to the possibility of ever letting it happen again. Maybe that was the difference: Norah had spent her life chasing that first moment of connection, no matter how many times she got burned. Erin, apparently, had made the opposite choice. She’d seen what it cost, and had spent the rest of her life, before The HH, refusing to ever pay it.

For a long time, neither of them moved. The cat returned, hopping up to the couch, kneading a pillow and settling in for the siege. Rain crackled against the window. The city’s heartbeat was a rumor at this altitude, the air inside too thick with loss to let anything else intrude.

Norah heard the words before she realized she’d spoken them: “You can’t carry it all yourself.” Her voice, a stranger’s, thin and so high it almost vanished.

Erin didn’t answer. She just shivered, the muscle spasms moving through her in ripples. She pressed her face to her knees and exhaled so hard the sound hurt to hear. Norah reached for her, then let her hand fall—what would be the point? She’d seen this in her own sisters, in herself: the way women were trained, through a thousand small lessons, to never accept an offered hand until it came with an apology or a favor or a promise to never ask for help again.

The phone, on the kitchen wall, started ringing again. This time, Erin let it ring until the machine picked up. The sound of her own voice, cheerful, recorded years ago: “Hi, you’ve reached Erin and Fluffernutter. Leave a message and we’ll get back to you.” Norah braced for Steve, for another crash of **** sibling need—but the message was a hang-up, the dead air whistling in her ear.

She looked around the room, trying to memorize every detail. She knew, in the logic of dreams or magic, that the next time she blinked it would all be gone: the sticky note on the fridge, the magnet in the shape of a trout, the faint stain on the wall from a Christmas candle that had exploded one year. Erin’s feet were bare, toenails painted a violent blue. Her hair was longer than Norah expected, not quite the wild halo from the game but something more ordinary, more practical. The tattoos on her ankles—a fern, a run of binary code, the world’s tiniest barcode—were faded, as if even the ink had decided not to stand out.

Norah tried to imagine what would happen if she stayed. If she **** herself to sit here, beside this person, until the sky cleared and the city woke up. Would anything change? Would Erin learn to trust her, or herself, or anyone? Or would the two of them just sit in silence, growing colder and smaller, until even the cat decided it was time to find a better home?

She wanted to believe it could be different. That, maybe, the next time the phone rang, Erin would pick up. That, maybe, the next time Steve called, she’d say, “I’ll be there,” and mean it. But Norah had lived long enough to know that hope was just another flavor of denial. Nothing ever got fixed by wishing. The only way out was through.

She closed her eyes, and the memory began to break apart—not all at once, but in jagged, unpredictable pieces, like a wall you try to punch your way through but only manage to chip at. The color drained from the kitchen, the light bleeding from the air. Erin’s figure went first, collapsing inward until she was nothing but a shadow on the linoleum. The smell of lemon soap receded, replaced by the cold, unbreathable chemical tang of the Garden of Glass.

Norah opened her mouth to call out, but her throat wouldn’t cooperate. The only sound was the rush of blood in her ears, the panic of loss so complete it left no room for self-pity or anger or even memory. She tried to stand, but her legs buckled. She sank to the floor, arms wrapped around her own ribs, and let herself shake.

The world flickered. For an instant, she was back in the gym, watching Myra break a friend with a few choice words. Then she was on the phone with her own father, the line filled with static, his voice farther away than ever. Then she was in the Garden, the mirrors all around her, the hum rising to a pitch that felt like a migraine coming on.

She pressed her hands to her eyes, trying to remember what kindness felt like, trying to summon a single good thing she could hold onto. But all she found was the echo of Erin’s laugh—the real one, not the bright, practiced version from the game but the raw, despairing noise she’d made tonight. That was the most honest sound Norah had ever heard, and it hurt more than anything.

She let it fill her. She let it break her open.

When she finally looked up, the kitchen was gone. The world had gone white. There was only the memory, and the knowledge that tomorrow, or next week, or next year, she would have to try again. To reach out, to be ****, to risk being shattered one more time.