He looked up from his plate. “The year you two were twelve and fifteen is a year that will haunt me to an early grave.”

Eric chuckled as he sipped his coffee. “Oh, this is a year that lives in infamy, to hear Alexis tell it.”

“Because they were a nightmare,” Dad said, though his words lacked heat.

“Oh my God, so dramatic,” Alexis said with an eye roll. “We weren’t that horrible.”

Dad’s eyebrows shot up in response.

I smirked. “There were nights when you and I were arguing so much, you would take your dinner upstairs and eat it away from me because you couldn’t freaking stand looking at my freaking face. A direct quote.”

Alexis dropped her head into her hands with a groan. “Okay, yes, I was a slightly dramatic teenager. But you, dear sister, were doing things like reading my journal, listening to my phone calls. You stole my curling iron and hid it, and that was my prized possession that year.”

“You did love that curling iron,” Dad mused with a sigh. “I sent your mother out late on a Friday night to buy you a new one because I asked Tabitha where she’d hid it.” His lips twitched. “And she’d forgotten.”

Eric threw his head back and laughed. “That makes this story even better.”

I pressed my fingers to my lips. “I think it might be buried in the alley next to Mrs. Kozlowski’s house.”

“That thing was my one true love before this guy came along,” Alexis said, nodding at her husband. “But by the next year, it was as if it had never happened. And we’ve been inseparable ever since.”

I smiled at my niece and wiped syrup from her cheek. “Even when we’re far away.”

Alexis squeezed my hand under the table three times, the sister code we developed the year after our sibling arguments ended and the simmering unhappiness between our parents erupted. The burst of high-pitched sounds, the never-ending back-and-forth, the anger and grief evident in every vowel and consonant. In a tiny row home, with almost no privacy, we had a front row seat to the end of our parents’ marriage, even as Dad tried to protect us from it.

He wasn’t the problem though. And it became obvious to Alexis and me that a united sisterly front made our days a lot easier to get through.

The far-off look in my dad’s eyes had me changing the subject. “But enough about curling irons and whether or not they’re still buried somewhere.” I tapped the watch on my wrist. “I’m home for exactly seventeen days, which is when Aunt Linda said she’s coming back from the shore and kicking me out. And I’ll need to be hitting the road again anyway. You better enjoy me while ya have me.”

“You’re the fun aunt, Aunty Tabby,” Juliet said wisely.