“I saw Shola.” She says this quietly, tentatively, as if reading my mind. I haven’t told her Shola has gone radio silent, but she knows. Otherwise, Shola would be here.

“You did?” I swat at the renegade tear snaking down my cheek. Sometimes it astounds me to think about how much I’ve messed up my life. I remember how once, when we all had to go visit Hudson in rehab, he stood in front of us in this room that smelled of nicotine and stale coffee and read a letter detailing all the ways he’d wronged us with his addiction. Apparently, he stole money from my backpack. He missed pretty much every one of Isla’s birthday parties. He once fed Fluffernutter a laced cookie. The list was long. As he talked, his hands shook, and when he said the word sorry, his voice cracked. That I think was the hardest part for him—that single word—and I remember thinking that he, and his therapist, had it all wrong. We were family. We weren’t tallying his sins. I didn’t care that he stole my money. I was waiting for him to promise to never use again.

“She stopped me in the hall. Asked how you were,” Isla says.

“What did you say?”

“I told her that she should call you if she really wanted to know.”

“You’re a good sister.”

“Duh,” Isla says.

“Seriously. I don’t say it enough.”

“Dude, you don’t say it ever.”

“Sorry,” I say, thinking of how maybe Hudson didn’t want to make promises he didn’t know if he could keep.

“You know that picture of Mom with her dummy?” When my mom was sixteen, she competed in a Junior Ms. New Jersey pageant and her talent was, I kid you not, ventriloquism. There’s this great picture of her, with ’80s bangs, in a taffeta pink ball gown, smiling at the brown-haired dummy in her lap. My dad had it framed for her fortieth birthday.

“Yeah.”

“I wonder what she was like back then.”

“I bet pretty much the same—well, before this all happened—though with more hair spray.”

“Yeah,” Isla says, and I can feel it. We are both thinking about that young, naive version of our mother, whose greatest hope was to be Junior Ms. New Jersey. Who even learned to talk out of the side of her mouth because she was so desperate to win. “So can I borrow your clothes when you’re in jail?”

I stick my pointer fingers in Isla’s armpits in that way she’s hated since she was tiny. For a moment, it feels like before, when I hadn’t yet ruined everything. When poking at each other was only a game.

“Okay, too soon for prison jokes,” she says, tucking her elbows close to her sides. “Got it.”