“No. But I can show her how to do that—like meditation, right? Or figure out who can help her. I can’t just accept my sister’s depression, or addiction. Then I’d be accepting Hannah ruining her life. Wasting it. My parents—if they saw what was happening to her … I can’t give up on her. That would be wrong. Selfish.”

River’s quiet for a moment. Twists a silver ring around her middle finger. When she looks up at me, her eyes have a slight mist over them.

“My brother died a few years ago,” she says. “Heroin overdose.”

People say things to me: I’m sorry, Oh my god, I didn’t know. Silence, I have learned, is golden. I rest my hand over hers. River’s fingers tighten around mine.

I am so afraid I will have to say those same words to someone someday: My sister. Died. Overdose.

“I spent years trying to help him. In and out of rehab,” she says, her voice quiet beneath the roar of the train as it crosses the Charles, where, even in this cold, there are rowers pushing through the midnight-blue water. “My parents went completely broke. I’d get calls in the middle of the night to come pick him up in these shady-ass places. He’d cry, you know? Feel so bad. Wanted to get better. Couldn’t. Manipulated us. God, he was so good at that. You never knew when he was lying or telling the truth. My parents actually gave him opiates once because he convinced them he’d kill himself if they didn’t give him his stash back. He overdosed more times than I can count. I carried Naloxone in my purse—we all did—just in case he ODed when we were around. I had to use it twice.”

“She’s not at that point yet,” I say.

But I have it in my purse, too. I did my research. It’s the only drug that can counteract the effects of an opiate overdose.

“And I hope she never will be. But I hear myself in you, Mae. I hear myself living in constant fear. That I was going to lose him, that it was my fault. That I could fix him or find the answers he was looking for. And the fear of losing him—it made me a hungry ghost. Because I thought that without him, I’d die, too. In our practice, we call this clinging. We cling to the things and people we love because we think they are the source of happiness and light and life for us. But this isn’t true. It can’t be. Because nothing and no one lasts forever. You know this more than maybe anyone I’ve met. When we cling, we set ourselves up for so much unnecessary suffering. I was holding on so tight—but in the end, I lost him anyway.”