“You told Drew you love him. I know you did.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“That’s brave, Nah. Telling him. After Micah, and Mom and Dad. You could say it. Even though you knew you could lose each other in a second. You almost did lose each other. But you still said it.”

“I broke up with him,” she says. “Just now.”

I run my hand over her hair. “Why?”

“My heart’s tired.”

“That’s very unscientific,” I say, after a little while in the silence. “But I get it. That’s how it feels. These days.”

She nods. We lie, watching the snow whip past the window. It was sixty-eight degrees in LA today. I checked.

“Did Ben tell you he loves you?”

I nod. And there must be something on my face that her genius self reads because those lines we both get when we’re confused appear between her eyebrows. “You … you haven’t said it back to him?”

It’s a relief to confess.

“My heart’s tired,” I whisper.

I’ll never forget the agony on Drew’s face when he arrived at the hospital, certain she was dead. The way a part of my insides started to tear into pieces when I felt my sister’s pulse, like it was in a distant galaxy and would disappear at any moment. No. No. I can’t do that again, not with anyone else.

“But you love him. I know you do. It’s so obvious.” She stares at me, hard. “You do.”

“Every time I look at him, all I can think about is how it will feel when he dies.”

Nah slips her hand into mine. She understands.

I look into her green eyes, and I see Dad. “I don’t want to be a hungry ghost.”

“What’s that?”

“Buddhist thing. How we try to fill the empty places inside us with people or things, but it doesn’t work.”

“Things like pills,” she says.

I nod. “And boys.”

The snow falls. The hospital gets quieter. The nurse comes in to check her IV. Nate drops off flowers. Says good night. The room is dark and quiet.

The snow falls. My sister is alive. I will be her bronze angel tonight. Watching.

I think Nah is asleep, but then she says, “I’m such a loser.”

“You’re actually in very good company,” I say. I pull the blanket up higher, tuck it around us. “Ben Franklin was an addict in later life. That shouldn’t have surprised me, because he misbehaved quite a bit in his day. And the DEA raided Monticello back in the eighties because Jefferson had poppies planted there.”

“The Founding Fathers got high?”

I nod. “It might account for them forgetting the rights of over half the population during the Continental Congress. Maybe all these years, we’ve just been cleaning up the messes of the most famous users in American history.”