“Hi…” I started awkwardly, not knowing how I fit into the family in this new version of my life. That was when I noticed that my mom was holding my dad’s hand, her thumb moving in a soothing back-and-forth motion over it. Aaron had turned his eyes away from me, and was now staring at the table, dead in the eyes.

“Sweetie, sit down,” my mom said softly. I slid into the empty chair, my stomach filled with lead. I thought they were going to tell me something awful about dreamdiving or that the AM had told them I was a hopeless case, or reveal to me that I’d done something terrible in my sleep.

The truth was so, so much worse.

“What’s going on?” I asked when no one seemed able to speak. My dad took a deep, heavy breath, before speaking.

“I wasn’t just wandering around the AM yesterday,” he said. “I was there for a checkup.”

“Okay…” I said. Aaron still wouldn’t look at any of us and that freaked me out more than the way my mom’s voice shook when she told me to sit down.

“I’ve been having some … memory problems.”

“What do you mean?”

“Forgetting where I put things, walking into a room and not remembering what I was doing there…”

“Okay, but, like, you’re…” I searched for a not super rude way to say it. “I mean, you’re not exactly young anymore.”

“No, I’m not.” He smiled sadly. “But this is a little more than just … senility. I forgot that you were at the AM this week, Rose.”

“What?” That hurt. Knowing what I know now, I get that it was just a symptom of the disease, that it just eats away at things indiscriminately and randomly, but in that moment, it really felt like he was forgetting me. Like my family could just carry on fine—thrive even—with me out of sight and out of mind.

“I spent most of the day yesterday at the AM, talking to doctors, getting tests and scans, and…”

Something caught in his throat. My mom squeezed his hand harder.

“I’m sick,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Aaron wince and when I turned to look at him fully, I saw a tear at the corner of his eye, begging to escape and go rolling down his face. The image made tears well up in my own eyes, like they’d been waiting there to rush forward since the moment I sat down. Like my body somehow knew that when I came downstairs this morning, my world would be changed forever and was preparing to expunge everything through tears.