“No matter what she’s done, Wendy’s my daughter. I’m going to stand by her, Ryan, the same way I’d stand by you. But if any of what that man said is true, even half of it, we have hard times ahead.”

By then Mom looked exhausted. I put my arms around her. She let me.

A few minutes later I stood in the driveway and watched her drive off before I closed the door. I felt wrung out from tonight and all the decisions ahead.

“Aunt Ryan!”

The girls often woke and called me. It wasn’t a nightly occurrence, but usually after a trip to the bathroom or a glass of water, they’d go right back to sleep. This was different. Holly sounded terrified.

I raced up the stairs and found her sitting at the top. She wasn’t quite awake, and not quite asleep. I reached for her, sitting close, and held her against me.

“Hey, it’s a bad dream, sweetheart. But that’s all. Just a dream. You’re home and I’ve got you.” I held her tighter.

“Mommy wasn’t here.”

I stroked her hair. “No, Mommy’s gone. But I’m here, and I’ll take good care of you.”

“No, Mommy was gone. Before. When I got up.”

For a moment I actually wondered if somehow my sister had gotten into the house, and Holly was trying to alert me. Of course, that was impossible.

“It was a dream. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does! She put us to bed, and we were supposed to sleep. But I felt sick. I threw up all over my sheets. And I got up to tell her. I knew she would be mad, but I couldn’t sleep that way. And my stomach hurt and my head was so dizzy.”

I wondered if Holly was talking in her sleep. Despite that I started to tremble, as if my body knew, before my mind, what was coming. I held her even closer. “Of course you couldn’t,” I said.

“But she wasn’t anywhere. Nobody was here. Just Noelle, and she wouldn’t wake up. Mommy wasn’t anywhere. I looked all over. I was so scared. I cried and cried, and finally the door opened and she came back.”

Holly looked up at me, and I saw she was wide awake now. “There was a man, and they were laughing. He wasn’t Daddy, but he kissed her. I ran downstairs, and she was so mad when she saw me, she shouted at me to go back to bed. I told her that I threw up, and she pushed me, and I fell, and she told me to sleep on the floor.”

I scrambled for the right thing to say. Could I pretend this was only a dream? But how awful for Holly to be told that what she remembered so clearly had never happened. She was sure it was real. How could I destroy her faith in herself or in me?

As I held her, and all the facts came together in my head and worse, in my aching heart, I knew the scene she’d recounted was no dream. It fit all too well with the things I’d already learned about my sister.