Over the years, I’d been so impatient with him and grown so irritated that I’d locked him out of my room. I’d shouted at him when he’d repeated my words back to me or gone on about something nonstop for hours, and I remember feeling so guilty and promising him that from that day forward, I would be the best sister I could be to him. I laid my hand on his cheek; it was soft and his eyelashes were so long. He made this little noise when he breathed out, and his lips kind of squished together like they had when he was a baby, and when he opened his eyes slowly and smiled at me, it felt like someone punched me in the stomach. He hardly ever smiled.

“I jumped out of the tree,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“I didn’t fly though,” he said and then he did something so strange and bizarre that I can only think it was because of the cocktail of drugs he was on. He reached up and put his little chubby hand on my cheek. I laid my hand over his and held on tightly, never wanting this moment of contact to end.

“Please don’t try to fly again,” I urged him.

He closed his eyes and shook his head a little. “I won’t. Night, night, Lori.”

I think I finally knew what it was to really love a sibling that night. I’d dozed off for a moment, with my head on the bed, holding on to his hand, when my parents came back. The air suddenly became thick with tension, so much tension you could almost taste it, bitter on your tongue. I’d kept my eyes closed and listened to the conversation that played out while they thought I was sleeping.

My father was having an affair with a realtor in her twenties named Maddy. My mother had found them celebrating in the hot tub with champagne after selling the last of their development in record time. He was apparently “in love” and moving out of our home to be with her. My mom begged him to stay. They could go to therapy, they could work it out, lots of couples managed to get through this, but he wasn’t interested. And the more he said no, the more my mother groveled and the more I wanted to scream and cry. I had to bite down so hard on my lip that night to stop myself from making a sound that it was bruised for a week afterward. And that was the day that everything changed. The day the doves cried.