After dinner, Lola pulled Amy toward the living room to begin the fossil excavation kit. Gloria and I cleared the table.
“You’re in trouble,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I usually prefer more supportive family conversations.”
“She said if you’re still part of each other’s lives.”
“I heard.”
“You looked like she proposed.”
“I did not.”
“You stopped breathing.”
I carried plates to the sink. Gloria followed.
“Thursday still?” Gloria asked.
“Yes.”
“No new deadline?”
“No new deadline.”
Gloria returned to the sink without arguing, which made my body search for one. In the living room, Amy sat cross-legged beside Lola in safety glasses, green excavation dust on one knee of her trousers. Comfortable. As if she had always belonged there. I gripped the dish towel harder.
“Mom would have liked her,” Gloria said.
My grip tightened on the counter. Our mother had died five years earlier. She had loved runners, loud music, careful people, and anyone who remembered flowers. She would have asked Amy a hundred questions and fed her twice.
“Low,” I said.
“True.”
The faucet ran. Water struck a plate. The sound became too much like the aid station—the paper cup, the hiss in my ears, the volunteer whose mouth moved without words reaching me. My fingers tingled. I set the plate down.
Gloria turned. “Dani?”
“I had a panic attack during the first marathon.”
The confession left in pieces, but it left.
Gloria set down the plate. “You told me you got sick.”
“I did. I threw up. I also couldn’t feel my hands and thought I was dying.”
Fear moved across her face—not disgust or disappointment, but fear for me, years late.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I did not want this face.”
“This is my sister-hid-something-painful-for-three-years face.”
