I stood up from the island and walked down to the basement, to the storage room with cardboard boxes on wire shelving. I stood on my tiptoes and carefully reached for a white box. Inside were the things my parents had given me from June. I had never even looked at them.

I peeled back the flaps and peered inside. There were a few of her T-shirts, some unused candles, trophies from her high school track-and-field days, and a black leather notebook. I carefully opened it and flipped through the pages.

There were doodles of spirals and triangles around mundane things like grocery lists and reminders to pay bills. I ran a finger along her handwriting, distinct, round loops that always made me joke that she had the penmanship of a child.

I flipped to the final page, and in the center, in her very small and childlike writing, was a sentence that broke my heart.

I need Amy to forgive me.

I didn’t know when she had written it, but I assumed it was during her endless cycle of getting clean and relapsing. When she would come back and try to make amends, and each time, my heart grew stonier, until it was a fortress. By the end, I was grateful because the fortress protected me from falling apart when she died and gave me a foundation to keep standing on.

Yet with those words, my fortress crumbled to dust.

I put the notebook in my lap and my hands over my face. Every tear I had held back, every sob I had suppressed, flooded out in my cold basement storage room. I could hear her whisper, asking for what she needed. Forgive me.

When my breath steadied, I took the box upstairs into the light. I put it next to my bed, and the notebook with my sister’s words on the desk. I looked at it for a long time before I fell asleep, wishing more than anything that I could hear her voice just one more time.

CHAPTER
34

Rain pelted against the windowpane in the kitchen, an angry chorus of water that made it difficult to see down the block. The trees whipped back and forth, releasing leaves onto the street, as branches scraped against the roof. We had meant to have those trimmed at the beginning of the summer, before storm season hit, but then everything happened with Liz.

I had the Weather Channel on in the background as I slowly unloaded the dishwasher. Jim Cantore frowned as he pointed to a dark red circle that encompassed the entire Chicago area. There was something called a derecho headed our way. A “record-breaking storm system,” he called it. Normally, it would have been exciting, equal parts fun and scary. But after what I had experienced over the past few weeks, scary was anything but fun.