Also he wouldn’t be alone now like I’d planned, we wouldn’t have the privacy I’d hoped for if Sarah was there.

For a split second I thought of telling her I couldn’t do it, to call her brother to pick her up and I’d try this talk with him another day. Turning around and going back to Wakan.

But I also remembered what it was like to get my first period without a mother to help me.

I’d been alone, I didn’t know what to do. My cramps had me doubled over and I’d bled on my clothes. I didn’t want Sarah to have any of the small traumas I’d been forced to endure because of an absentee mom. So I made my decision.

“I can be there in twenty minutes.”

I came and I felt like an imposter when I signed her out of school. An adult she trusted enough to call in an emergency, but one who hadn’t been here in half a year and had to answer for it.

“Does Justin know where you are?” I asked her as we came out to the parking lot.

“No.”

“Okay, well we need to tell him. Text him right now.”

“He’s not gonna get a phone call or something telling him I’m gone. I’ll just tell him when I get home, it’s already embarrassing enough.”

I opened the door on the driver’s side and stood there to talk to her over the roof. “Sarah, I don’t feel good about taking you from school unless your guardian knows I’m doing it.”

She opened the passenger side and threw her backpack into the back seat. Then she leveled her eyes on me with the most annoyed teenager glare I’d ever seen. “He’s not gonna care. It’s you.”

She got in and slammed the door.

I sighed. She was probably right, he wouldn’t care. If he cared, he would have taken my name off the emergency contact list. Still.

I got in and started the car. There was no point in arguing with her. She wouldn’t budge and I wouldn’t be the one to text him. Six months of no contact and my first message to him was “hi, your sister got her period”? No.

I’d just explain it to him when I got there. And then I’d search every inch of his face looking for any sign that he didn’t hate me.

I got Sarah her supplies. Then I took her to Culver’s for burgers. I walked her through how to use everything while we ate in the parking lot in the front seat.

“Take this.” I handed her two Motrin. “Take one to two every six hours starting the minute you get your period. You have to stay ahead of the pain, okay? It’s harder to make the cramps stop once they start.”

She took the pills with her Sprite.

“Hot baths help. You can also use a heating pad. And tell Justin he needs to wash anything with blood on cold, okay?”

“Justin doesn’t do my laundry anymore. I do it,” she said.

I looked at her, surprised. “Really? Since when?”

She shrugged. “A while. He taught me and Alex how to do it. We do a lot of stuff now.”

The corners of my lips twitched up. “Like what?”

“I cook.”

“You cook?”

“Yeah. With Justin.”

“What else?” I asked.

She bit the tip off a fry. “We have a chore chart. Oh, and Alex drives. He’s got the van.” She wrinkled her nose.

I laughed a little. “And you? How have you been?”

She shrugged. “Pretty good. I won my dance competition. I painted my room. Taught Brad to roll over and shake.”

“He never changed the name, huh?”

“Nope.”

No, he wouldn’t. And Human Brad probably still sent him every Toilet King thing he could get his hands on.

She went on about all the changes since I left. New traditions on holidays and funny stories about the other kids and plans they’d made for spring break.

I smiled softly.

I was so proud of them. They were okay—not that I thought they wouldn’t be. But I think they really were okay.

They’d figured it out. Come together as a family, found normalcy and joy in the aftermath of everything they went through and everything, and everyone, that they’d lost. And Sarah had a maturity about her now that she didn’t have before. And not the kind that comes from growing up too fast in the midst of trauma. The kind that comes from healthy parenting and coming of age. It made me happy.

It made me feel like I’d done the right thing leaving when I did. Because I would have done nothing but undo any progress they made when I would have inevitably left.

“Me and Justin made Mom’s cookies,” she said. “They came out good. He said you would have really liked them.”

The sudden mention of him mentioning me made my heart flip.

I’d missed so much. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, his birthday, the kids’ birthdays. They had to hate me. How could they not?

“We miss you, you know,” she said.

The words caught me by surprise and I looked over at her.

“You do?”

She talked to the burger in her lap. “Everybody was like, really sad when you left.”

I swallowed. “They were?”

“Yeah. Like, I know you’re not, but it kind of felt like you were my big sister or something. You were our family.” She looked at me.

I studied her. “I felt like that too. I didn’t want to have to leave,” I said.

“Then why did you?” she asked.