“He said hi.”
“I heard you.”
“Chase…”
“He didn’t say hi.”
“He’s been saying hi for a while, Chase. He says it to me, and I don’t pass it on because you do this.”
She breathed out, the gentle way she did when she was choosing her next words carefully.
“He’s not—heisn’t holding it. I think he stopped holding it a long time ago, honestly, and he’s been waiting on you.”
“He told you that?”
“He didn’t have to.”
“Mai—”
“He had coffee with me yesterday. He asked me how you were, and I told him sometimes you call and sometimes you don’t, and he said, ‘Tell him I said hi.’ So I’m telling you. That’s all.”
I didn’t say anything. There was warmth in her voice when she’d said wehad coffeethat I had heard exactly once before, when she was sixteen and a boy had brought her flowers and asked her to the spring dance.
“Mai.”
“Don’t.”
“Mai.”
“Don’t, or I am hanging up. I will hang up, and I will not pick up on Sunday?—”
“Fine.”
She paused and I let her.
“Are you okay?” she hedged.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I’m functionally fine.”
“That is not a thing.”
“It is. I’m making it a thing. It’ll be trending on TikTok in a week.”
She laughed, the small one, the one that was mostly breath.
I lived for that laugh.
I would have signed away anything for that laugh, and in a sense, I had, every month, when the hospital billed me for her experimental treatment. A treatment for a human disease in a shifter body, and my accountant moved numbers around so my sister could keep being someone who laughed.
“Have you talked to Mom or Dad lately?” she asked.
“No.” I wasn’t bringing this up again.
“Chase…”
