“What?”

“I just had a lucid dream of standing trial against you.”

I laugh. “I’d be at my most competitive.”

“Oh, yeah. I’d settle the shit out of it. I’d tell the jury I walked into your knife and repeatedly stabbed myself.”

“I’m really glad that this is my reputation, because I’d stop at nothing to win. Remember the year you wouldn’t let me get an eyebrow piercing, so I told three of the girls you brought home that you collected nail clippings?” I shake my head. “I was such a monster.”

“Remember how instead of trying to figure out why my bereaved thirteen-year-old sister was acting out, I would just scream and ground her?”

“Oh my god. That time you sent me to my room without dinner, so I started a hunger strike?”

“You didn’t eat for days. I was fucking worried.”

“Oh, I ate. Jade brought me snacks every night. I was well fed.”

He pulls at my earlobe in retaliation. But then his eyes soften into something that I know will soon become all syrupy and cheesy, so I stick out my tongue at him. “Don’t get mushy on me, Killgore.”

“I can’t believe they just handed you to me. License to fuck you up.”

“Seriously? I can’t believe they subjected you to the vigorous whirlpool of hormones that lurks within a teenage girl.”

“And yet, look at you.” He exhales a laugh. Briefly speechless. Amazed. “You’ve succeeded so extensively. You’re either going to work at Sanchez and revolutionize the semiconductor industry, or get a PhD and fucking redefine the field of astrophysics.”

I glance away. “It’s not—I’ve failed at plenty of things.”

“Like what?”

“Like…” I feel alone all the time, I don’t tell him. I’ve been trying to fall out of love with the eldest Harkleroy for years. And there’s worse, Eli. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing. I’m a hamster running on a wheel of doom. “The Sanchez thing. And the MIT offer…It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Maya, it is.” His fingers gently twist my head toward him. “You have accomplished a lot, and you did it on your own. I know it has nothing to do with me, but I’m going to get it etched on my tombstone. ‘Did not interfere too badly with the development of a great mind.’ Even Mom and Dad would be happy with me.”

I bite my lower lip. The inside of my cheek. “Do you think…”

“What?”

“That Mom and Dad would be here? At the wedding?”

Eli shrugs. “I’d love to say yes, but I have no clue.” He knows how hard it’s been for me, coming to terms with the knowledge that the father my brother experienced was so different from the one I adored. That the reason Eli was so scarce during the first decade of my life had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with his fraught relationship with our parents. The dad he knew wasn’t protective, but dictatorial. Mom, absent instead of nurturing. And I struggle to reconcile one simple truth: if they hadn’t died, Eli and I would still be strangers, and…I would hate that. It has to make me a terrible person, right?