“It’s not your fault, Kavita,” he tells her, slow and deliberate, as if trying to convince her.

“Look, I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make me feel better. But I don’t want to feel better about this. Okay? I don’t deserve to feel better about this. I messed up. And it cost my brother his life. That’s the truth. I have to live with it.”

“I felt the same way for a long time. But it’s like Brenda said last night. We did the best we could at the time. If we could have saved our siblings, we would have. We didn’t want them to die.”

“Don’t you feel like you’re letting yourself off the hook?”

“Maybe,” he shrugs. “Mostly, though, I’ve accepted my limitations. I can’t go back in time. I can’t read minds. I couldn’t take Sequoia’s illness onto myself. I couldn’t save her. I wanted to more than anything. Even now, it’s what I want more than anything. It always will be. But all my love and good intentions and regret don’t change a thing. There’s no way to undo this. Not the damage she did to herself or the damage she unknowingly did to us. So, in order to live my life, and face all the decades ahead of me, I’ve had to accept the choice she made. That doesn’t mean I agree with it even remotely. It doesn’t lessen the pain whenever I think about her and how she died. It doesn’t change the fact that I wish she’d believed in her resilience as much as I did, and made a different choice. It just means I accept that I can’t change what happened. She made a choice from a place of pain, hoping the pain would end, but it didn’t. I don’t have the power to change any of that.”

“Well, that’s a lot to accept.”

“People always talk about acceptance like it’s the thing that’ll set you free. To me, it’s been the thing that’s humbled me. At one point, it almost broke me.” He wets his lips. “Listen Kavita, I understand how much you’re hurting. Or at least I know my version of it. If I’ve learned anything from Sequoia, it’s that nothing can grow in that place.”

“Isn’t it wrong to move on without them?”

“We’re not moving on without them.” He places a hand over his tattoo. “With them, right? If our siblings have taught us anything, it’s that we need light.”

“And what if I don’t deserve any?”

“What would your brother say to that?”