She looks up at me and then over at Isla, and for the first time, I can see the recognition in her eyes. That we are human beings stuck in the swampiness of real life, and that we are scared. I wish I weren’t wearing my hiking clothes. I pull out my jaunty ponytail, hoping that will add a year or two.

“Have a seat, sweetheart,” she says. “Waiting is always the hardest part.”

Is waiting the hardest part? I wonder. I don’t know. In the last few weeks, while we’ve been waiting in a different kind of purgatory, I’ve thought that the in-between was what made everything so difficult. Now, I think the in-between is emotional boot camp. It’s what prepares us for whatever’s next.

A few kids hold their elbows at awkward angles. I see a couple of black eyes, and one person who looks like they might have the flu. A woman drenched in blood sits across from us. The nurses give her a towel to drape over the rust-colored stains, but she refuses to cover herself. Maybe she thinks that will get her seen by a doctor faster. I hope it works.

I try to pin down Hudson in my mind’s eye, as if seeing him in my brain will mean he still exists somewhere in our world. I decide to think not about the Hudson I saw the last time he was at our house—hopped up and twitchy—but about the sober Hudson from two Christmases ago. He was fresh out of rehab, and he showed up shaved and with a new haircut. He’d bought Isla a book—The Secret Garden, I think—and me a candle from Anthropologie, and my mom and dad made such a big deal out of him remembering to bring us gifts, like he’d won the Nobel Peace Prize and not like he spent an hour picking stuff out for his sisters at the Grove, that their low expectations piled on another unnecessary layer of awkward.

Later, though, we watched a movie marathon downstairs under cashmere blankets because my mom had the screeners for the Golden Globe nominees, and Hudson didn’t refer to my mother as stepmonster even once. For a while there, all tucked in with them like a normal family, I wondered if all the energy I wasted on worrying about my half brother could be spent on liking him instead.