“There IS NO GETTING BACK TO NORMAL. My parents are dead. There is no normal, not ever again. So don’t fucking sit there and tell me that I’m gonna go to detox or rehab or whatever and then everything will be great, because it won’t.”

Uncle Tony goes red in the face, but Aunt Nora puts a hand on his arm and I think he literally bites his tongue. I bet he’s drawn blood.

I stand and cross the room. Sit down next to her. “The pills won’t bring them back,” I say. “I know sometimes they help you forget how bad it is—but isn’t everything worse, when the pill wears off? Worse than before you took them?”

Her eyes fill. “You don’t understand.”

I stare at her. “How can you say that, Nah? I lost them, too.”

“But you don’t know what it’s like to be me,” she says. Great, big fat tears roll down her face. “You have a future, a life. I have nothing. I’m probably not even going to graduate. I have lost everything. Everything in less than a year.”

“You have me,” I say. “You will always have me.”

“I won’t. You’ll be gone by July first.”

She remembered. The exact date that Plebe Summer begins. I didn’t think she was ever really listening when I talked about school stuff, but she was.

“I told you, I’m not going,” I say. “There are tons of schools here. You have me. Always.”

For just a second, her eyes soften a bit, but then she sets her chin. Stubborn. “Mae, you knew my boyfriend was cheating on me, and you didn’t tell me. I get you thought you were helping me, but you weren’t. And now I can’t trust you. So what makes you think I’ll want to spend another second under any roof with you once we graduate?”

This is her addiction talking. I know that. But what if it’s not? What if I gave up Annapolis for nothing?

“Enough. Enough of this.” Aunt Nora’s voice is trembling. “Do you know what I would give to have my sister back? To be sitting on that couch with her?”

She kneels on the rug in front of us, her hair a mess of black tangles. Nah looks like a carbon copy of Mom, almost, but Aunt Nora looks like her, too.

“My sister is dead.”

This woman in front of me: This is how I would be, if I lost Nah.

“I have to remind myself of this every morning when I wake up,” she says, “because I forget. I wake up and I think, I have to tell Lila I had the most awful dream about her. This horrible wave, and I was searching in the rubble, looking and looking … and then I remember.”