Her pleas, as enthusiastic as they were, did nothing to sway him. As I followed them out, I noticed Miles’s door was still closed. He’d scheduled a breakfast meeting this morning, and he wouldn’t be in for another hour or so. This was good; I suspected when I returned to my office, Wallis would have some words for me, and I’d rather not my boss overhear.

Once my door was shut again, Wallis wheeled on me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“There’s been a lot going on, Wallis. I only found out a few weeks ago.” The emptiness I’d just felt upon seeing Atlas and Ari together, for the first time in the flesh, was now filling with a burning, aching heat. I was tempted to fan myself with printer paper.

“What’s a few?” she asked. “Two? More?”

“I’m not sure.” Why did I still feel the need to obfuscate? Wallis had seen Ari with her own two eyes, heard the word girlfriend, seen her clutch Atlas in front of me.

“That’s a lie,” she said, arms crossed over her chest.

I collapsed into my office chair and leaned my head against the back of it. “Ari came back in April. I ran into her at your boss’s book party. And here we are.”

“In April? Before we went to Charleston? Dodo, why on earth didn’t you tell me? I’m your sister. If we don’t share each other’s burdens then what is the point?”

I removed my eyes from my office ceiling and trained them across the desk on Wallis. “Don’t be angry,” I said, stretching my arms out, gesturing that she should sit in the chair Atlas had occupied only minutes ago. “Please.”

“I’m not angry!” Her tone, and the fact that she remained in her current stance, undercut these words to some extent. “I love you. I just wish you could be as vulnerable with me as I am with you. It’s so easy for me to open up to you. I don’t even give it a second thought. Sometimes it hurts when I see you holding things back. God, Daisy.” She sighed. “All this time. All this time you’ve been carrying this by yourself. How have you managed it?”

“I’ve managed just fine.” She didn’t want to sit? All right. I stood and walked to my window. I had a view of the squat police station below, an armed officer keeping watch from behind concrete barricades. The image was reflective of how I’d been feeling these past months: defensive, on guard. The unintended by-product had been missing my mother’s grief, isolating myself from my sister’s honest gaze that always held me to account. But I’d done it for all of us. “There were other things that took precedence.”

“Like what?”