I stay quiet, listening intently. I’m sitting on a warm purple velvet couch and the wall behind her is covered in books and trinkets. The other wall has a couple of framed yoga posters with different inspirational sayings on them.

“The first option would be to distance yourself from the people who have brought on this pain and strife in your life. You could stay with your grandfather and Jamie for a while if it’s too hard to be around your mom. Try to get a job and work toward getting your own place. But that doesn’t sound like what you want.”

I’ve been shaking my head no from the beginning of her proposal. “No, I—I want my family to be my family. How do I fix us?”

“Your family has hurt you in so many different ways, and clearly you’ve been holding on to that anger for a very long time. If you truly want to move forward, I think you need to ask yourself if you have the capacity to forgive them. And then you have to figure out what you need from them moving forward to ensure your trust is won back.”

I look up from the floor and meet her eyes.

“I know this is going to be difficult. But we can work through it together. And you know … it would be helpful to have Jamie here too. I’m sure she’s dealing with some very similar struggles right now.”

“She has some weird aversion to therapy; there’s no way she’ll want to come.”

“Would you like her to come?” Donya asks.

I nod.

“Tell her that. She can be your first letter. See if you can forgive her. Lay out everything she’s done that has hurt you. And tell her what you would like moving forward. See what happens. You’re allowed to ask for what you need, Siri. That’s the only way for people to know that you need it. If someone can’t respect what you need from a relationship, then they’re probably not worth having around.”

I swipe at the tears dripping out of me and nod.

“Have you spoken to Dawn since you left?”

I shake my head vigorously.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to make Jamie more upset, and … I told Dawn it was a snow globe and that’s it, and then I’ll be gone and we can just look back at our perfect day.”

“But you really like her.”

I nod.

“And you’d like to keep in touch with her.”

I nod.

“So why did you propose this snow globe?”

“It’s something Jamie told me she was doing with Zarar … Jamie says some stupid excrement, but sometimes, when you think about the stuff hard enough, it starts to seem reasonable and kind of lovely in a broken sort of way.”