“Go on about Dad,” she said. “I want to know everything before we see him.”

“Looking back, Lena, I believe this dementia has been happening for a long while, a slow decline, and Mother covered for him. You know how they were—so tightly knit together. I think she made sure we didn’t know, or maybe she herself didn’t want to know. Either way, she concealed it.”

“That makes sense. She would protect him from anything.” Colleen leaned back on the seat and watched the landscape fly by—the wooden stands selling fresh shrimp, trees crowding the road alongside ramshackle cottages on the two-lane highway. “We will figure this out together.”

He took a breath and then paused before asking, “Did you know Hallie moved from Savannah? They’re only ten minutes away now, at the edge of town.”

“Yep. Dad told me.”

They were silent for a while as the mere mention of her name created open spaces, timid pauses. At a red light a few miles from town, Shane turned to Colleen. “Hallie is meeting us at the pub,” he said. “Dad’s having lunch with some old buddies and we’ll catch up with him at home later.”

“Hallie? Can’t that wait?” Colleen wanted to find her feet first, to take a breath and inhale the Lowcountry air, to hug her dad before she had to face her sister.

“Lena.” It was a one-word admonishment.

“I go by Colleen now. You know that, Shane.”

“Not with me you don’t.”

Colleen let the comment rest and inhaled the briny scent of the marsh as she began to take it all in, as if she would be required to write about the spruce and pine proudly shooting toward the sky, about the summer green grasses and the hand-painted signs announcing fresh shrimp, peaches and strawberries. She held her hand out the window and let it roll with the wind, dipping and rising. She and Hallie had done that as children—perched on opposite sides of the backseat and put their hands and arms out the windows to pretend the car was a plane.

“You’ll cut off your hand when a truck passes by,” Shane said with the grin that all the girls had fallen for since he was a young child.

They laughed, easing the tension that had filtered between them. The line was what he’d told them when they were young—always so logical, their little brother.

“Lena,” he said as she pulled her arm back into the car, “it’s happening fast.”

“What do you mean?”

“Even though Mother might have hid it for a while, he’s now gone too far, too fast.”

“For example?”