“Is she…sick?” Ciana asked quietly, her eyes filling with tears once again.

“No, sweetie,” Nova’s mom, Felicity, was quick to tell her. “She’s fine now. She just had to grow a little more before she could come home. But she doesn’t have a very strong immune system right now. So we try not to let her around a lot of people who might be sick so that she doesn’t catch their illness.”

“Oh.” Ciana’s tears disappeared. “I promise I’m not sick and neither are my brothers or sister. Neither is Ryan. Right, Ryan?” She practically growled the question in my direction, her eyes shooting flames at me in a silent command to answer.

“I’m not sick,” I replied dutifully, but only because I didn’t want them to take Nova away.

“I don’t have anything Nova could really play with, though,” Ciana said, her tone turning sad once again. Her emotions were all over the place, and it was giving me a headache. “I was expecting her to be bigger, like Vito and Bennie. Not tiny like a baby.”

“I’m not a baby!” Nova yelled, offended. “I’m a big girl.”

Ciana’s face scrunched up, like she wanted to argue but didn’t want to make her cousin angry.

“She means you’re short, Nova,” Garret told her with a laugh. “All her toys and games are for tall people. Not shrimps like you.”

Nova released my hand and strolled over to her brother. She walked so calmly up to him that when she kicked him in the leg hard enough to make him shout in pain, we were all surprised. Well, everyone except for their mom.

“Don’t be mean to me, Garret!” she yelled up at him as he hopped on one foot while trying to rub away the ache in his leg.

“Nova, don’t kick your brother,” Felicity scolded, but her voice was back to being soft once more, not full of steel like it had been when she’d spoken to her son. “Garret, don’t tease your sister about how tall she is or isn’t.”

Garret stopped rubbing at the sore spot on his shin. “So, it’s against the law to speak the truth now? Yeah, okay, whatever.” He rolled his eyes. “We gonna play with your Xbox or not, Ciana?”

“Yeah, of course we are. But what about your sister? I don’t want her to feel left out.”

“I’ll play with Nova,” I offered.

“Yay!” Nova squealed, bouncing happily back to me and putting her hand in mine—where it belonged. The act was so natural, so full of trust, it was as if she’d been doing it all her life. It made my chest squeeze in that funny way again, and I tugged her closer. “Can we play hide-and-seek?”

“Nova, let’s save that game for when you aren’t tired from traveling all day,” her mom recommended. “We don’t want you to fall asleep while hiding. What if Ryan can’t find you?”

“I would find her, no matter what,” I vowed.

Ciana and Garret left to play in the game room on the second floor, and I guided Nova up to my room. I didn’t have a lot of things a girl would normally want to play with, but Nova didn’t seem to mind as she skipped around my room, inspecting everything.