Kael nodded again. Ugh, his silence here wasn’t helpful. He wasn’t prepared for my father.

I made sure to stay on the main road, really the only route I could navigate without getting lost in the sprawl of Fort Benning. We were less than five minutes from my dad’s house. But I was more than half an hour late. It would be fine. I was an adult, and something came up. They would get over it. I repeated that to myself and began to concoct an excuse that didn’t necessarily involve a stranger staying at my house.

My phone vibrated in the cupholder between us, and I reached for it the moment I saw that it was Austin calling. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d returned one of my calls.

“I’m going to get this, it’s—” I didn’t finish explaining to Kael.

“Hello?” I spoke into the phone but got only silence.

I lifted it from my cheek. “Damn it.” I’d missed the call. I tried to call him back, but he didn’t pick up. I hated feeling like I let him down by missing a call or not being there for him, even though he had no problem ignoring my calls and casually treating me like an inconvenience.

“If you see the screen light up, tell me. The sound doesn’t always work.” I looked down at my phone and Kael agreed with a nod.

“Another broken thing,” I swear I heard him say. But when I asked him what he’d mumbled, he shrugged.

I turned onto my dad’s street and tried to spend the last two minutes of the drive conjuring up an achievement, or something I could stretch to sound like one. I would need something to talk about after the scolding for my extreme tardiness. My dad always asked his darling wife and me the same questions. The difference was, it only took her planting a flower bed or going to someone else’s kid’s birthday party to get praise, when I could save a small village and he would be like, That’s great, Kare, but it was a small village. Austin once saved a slightly larger village and Estelle created two villages.

It wasn’t healthy to compare myself to his new wife or to my brother—I was self-aware enough to know that. But the way he cosseted her still bugged the hell out of me. And then there was the fact that Austin was my dad’s doppelgänger, and I was my mom’s. We were twins, but he looked like him and I looked like her. This worked out better for my brother than it did for me; to my dad, I was a copy, and a constant reminder of my mother.

“We’re almost there. My dad’s been in the Army a long time.”