Out in the living room it’s quiet, but I know she’s awake. I still remember the rhythms of her sleep. Perhaps that’s the real intimacy: to know how someone else breathes when they’re asleep. To know the patterns, to predict how they’ll move. In our old room as kids, our beds were so close together that Ruth and I could reach out with our fingers and touch. One time, when I was in second grade, I’d taken a treasure from the teacher’s desk. It was a round piece of basalt stone, smooth as skin. The teacher used to run it under hot water and give the warm trophy to the kid who’d done the best that day. She never once gave it to me. When I stole it, I hid it in the vent in our bedroom. I was stroking a forefinger over the top of that stone when Ruth saw me.

“Alex,” she said, coming right beside me. She reached out a hand and moved hair from my forehead. “I’ll get you your own perfect rock. Put that one back tomorrow before the teacher notices it’s gone.” That was when she still had my back.

Ruth left the farm when she was twenty, seven years after she tore our family apart. Mom didn’t want her to go, even if she couldn’t say it loudly. Every time Ruth passed by with a new armful of belongings to put into her boyfriend Hal’s stupid car, Mom touched her on the shoulder or arm, but Ruth kept going. Hal offered her a get-out-jail-free card, and she took it. He burned out of our driveway in that car, rock music blaring in Mom’s face. There’s no doubt in my mind he’s the father of Ruth’s baby. She can say he isn’t, that he’s a thing of the past, but there’s no way. I don’t believe it for a second.

Two summers after Ruth took off, Dad found Mom lying face-first in the field out back of the house. She used to walk on her own each evening. It was a heart attack, which sounds right if you’re listing organs most likely to store sadness. They said it happened fast, but I know that part’s a lie. It was slow and insidious, and Ruth was at the root of it all.

I’ve spent years sorting through the things Ruth has done, putting them away, rising above them. I doubt she’s been doing the same. She definitely hasn’t come here to apologize.

From the living room, I hear her stir and turn over. I push the duvet aside and get out of bed quietly, anxious not to wake up Chase. She must have heard me, too, because she whispers hoarsely into the gloom.

“Alex, is that you?”