“That’s okay,” I say. “I don’t she’d be thrilled to see either of us.” I don’t know why I feel compelled to visit Alex, but I do. Perhaps I’m still trying to prove my worth, which is silly, I know, since I’m the one escaping with my freedom, while she’s in all kinds of trouble. It’s not only the drugs, now—there are other charges being laid against her involving children, harm, and fraud—when I saw Morris to get the forms for my housing, he told me everyone’s coming out of the woodwork. The case against my sister is growing each day. He said it’s a shit show. But even after everything Alex has done, it’s not what I want for her.

“You don’t want to see her, do you?” Sully looks shocked. And he’s right: Why would I go back for more? It seems masochistic. But it’s something deeper that drives me back to her—an instinct, a shared blood—hard to explain if you’re not within it. Try as I might to hate her, I can’t seem to sidestep feeling love.

“I know her,” I say. I know exactly why she is the way she is.

“Is that why you decided to stay here?” he asks. “In Moses River, I mean?”

At my chest, Will makes the softest coo. I stayed to fix things, to heal all the wrongs. To take my sister’s place.

But I don’t say any of that. I just shrug.

“Right,” Sully says. He swallows hard, and we both stare at the table, lost for a minute in the past. “There’s something that’s been nagging at me.” His eyes bore into mine. “Alex said she was the guarder. What did she mean? Because of her job?”

I kiss Will on the bridge of his nose, adjust Pim’s clothespin on the blanket wrapped around him. “It’s her role in a game,” I say. “Hurry home. The game we played as kids on the day my brother died.”

I won’t say that I ran from the tree line that day to see Pim on the ledge of that grain truck, his little toes hooked over the rim, the wooden clothespin in the dark of his fist. Or how I saw Alex at the very top of the ladder, flailing at the peg, grabbing at it, trying to become the guarder, shouting furiously, so mad at him that she shoved him, hard, and he fell down, down, down into the grain until he was out of sight. I wish I could tell him all of this, but I can’t. I won’t. Sometimes words aren’t enough, or they just don’t matter. And even when sisterhood is a prison, like it has been for me, it’s always, always a vault.

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