I stare at my mother’s taut face, and then at Oliver’s, which mirrors my shock. And then at my phone on the kitchen table.

“Will she speak to me now?” I say. “Now that I know?” My voice sounds bold and steady, which is not how I feel at all.

Mom sighs.

“Try her.” She looks at me. “She doesn’t want to hear any more from me right now, Gillian. But she gave me permission to tell you. She said I was the one who should tell you the truth.”

I feel a sudden wave of anger.

“This honestly didn’t cross your mind, Mom?” I say. “That this whole thing could have had anything to do with how she just took off?”

Mom flinches, and looks away from me.

“Gillian, we’d just buried it so deep.”

I close my eyes.

This is what I’m starting to know: that we can bury the truth as deep as we like, but that, like heat or rot, truth rises.

It always rises.

*

Mom told me, I text. Can we speak?

I wait for what feels like a long time, waiting for the three little dots. But instead, the phone rings, and I almost drop it right where I’m sitting. My heart beating fast, I pick up as Mom’s eyes and Oliver’s follow me. I leave the kitchen and move to the living room. Thank God Sam’s still upstairs….

“Abigail?”

“Gillian…”

I bite my lip to keep in the sudden wave of feeling. My sister. I’d forgotten the particular pitch of her voice. How low it is, how musical; the cold-water shock of it. And now for the first time I’m wondering where she inherited it from. If the woman who gave birth to her has a voice just like it.

“So, Mom told me,” I say.

Silence.

“Well. Now you know. Now we both do.”

“Abigail…I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

Another silence.

“Not really,” she says. “Are you?”

“Not really.”

We stay on the line: her breathing, me breathing.

“Mom feels terrible,” I say. Do I really think it’ll make her feel better? I don’t know.

“Gillian,” my sister says. “I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

I swallow.

“Is Lorna…is she really that sick?”

“She’s sick,” Abigail pauses. “She doesn’t have family, Gillian. She has friends, and people she loves. But she doesn’t have family.” Her voice slows again. “The doctors don’t know. Nobody knows, Gillian. It depends how she responds to the rest of the treatment…chemo, radiotherapy.” She swallows. “At first she wasn’t going to do any of that at all. She said she’d prefer to just let nature take its course. But now she says she’s changed her mind.” Abigail takes another breath. “I heard there’s about a 30 percent chance of her being alive in five years, for a cancer like this.”