“You need to take care of yourself. It’s impossible to make it through this world with the way you’re living and treating yourself. You’re making yourself so unhappy. I’ve seen you do it over and over again.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t just say okay.” She turned off the radio. “I have a wild thought.”

Ayanna’s eyes teared up.

“I’ve been watching you your entire life and you have everything anyone could want. You have a person who loves you, you work to help people and make money from it, you have close friends. And still, you won’t give me up.”

“I killed you,” Ayanna said. “And the world is ugly, people are cruel, and no one values life and it all feels fucking hopeless. How can I do this for forty more years? Fifty? And it should have been me. You should be here.”

Then, she cried a little because it felt so childish to say aloud. Ayanna reached a hand forward to the front seat. Olivia took it and clasped Ayanna’s palm, and in it, she felt the squishy soft of the dead in her touch, immediately let go, then reached for it again. She knew her sister was saying it was an accident, there was no way they could have known, and trying to get Ayanna to say it back, to confirm she understood. Say it, Olivia said. Stop hurting yourself, she said. Ayanna mouthed the words. Tried to make them feel true.

“Why wouldn’t you talk to me before this? I miss you so much. You’re the only person—” Ayanna said. She had to stop to swallow, her throat so thick with tears. “I love you. Every day still hurts without you. You’re my sister.”

“My turn isn’t finished. You’re being selfish. You’re wallowing. You complain so much about how other people treat life, and still, you’re afraid to really live. And it’s such bullshit, Ayanna. You know what’s next isn’t half as pleasurable as it is here. You could be living for both of us. And you’re getting old.”

“Thirty-three isn’t old.” Ayanna rolled her eyes. She held on to her sister’s hand.

“Okay, fine. It’s not that old, whatever. I’m not here to bicker about age. If it feels hopeless, you do things for other people,” Olivia said, and Ayanna heard the echo of their grandmother in her cadence. She heard herself too.

“I love you,” Ayanna said again.

“Prove it.”

Rose shampoo, mint gum, moldy bouquet water, and a smell that she could not articulate but that her nose knew was Olivia. She had known it since they were in the womb, growing from legume-sized to seven pounds, and snuggling together in their amniotic sac, and relearning again when they rolled together on floors and blinked at one another from their parents’ exhausted arms. Home smell.