“I’m fine. That coffee hit me wrong. I’ll be out in a second.” With deep breaths, Colleen stood in front of the mirror and squeezed some of Shane’s toothpaste onto her finger. She rubbed it on her tongue and swished water around her mouth and then spit it out, watching it flee down the drain. If she was really going to stay and help her brother with this project for her beloved dad, she must find a way to get control of the emotions that swelled and surged with every prod. “Get it together,” she said to her image. “Right now.”

She opened the door and joined her sister, who averted her gaze, and her brother, who had a plan to save their dad. “Okay,” Colleen said, “tell me everything the doctor told you about this disease. I need to know before we do one more thing.”

Shane sat and slumped with the weight of this discussion, as if it was a bag of concrete held between his shoulder blades. “This has been killing me, Lena. But I’ve been the one dragging Dad from doctor to doctor until we landed at the neurologist.”

Colleen collapsed on a chair. “I feel so . . . left out.”

“I think you left us out a long, long time ago.” Hallie spoke while staring at the table, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

Colleen had every perfect comment to return—she’d had years to perfect those comments—and right now she would say, I think you were the one who left me out on my wedding day. Least that’s how I remember it. But instead she stared at her sister, screwing her back molars together so tightly that she felt the tension in her scalp. “Don’t,” she said to Hallie.

“Say it,” Hallie said, her mouth quivering. “I’m ready. You’ve held it in all these years and I want you to say it all. Say everything cruel you’ve ever wanted to say. Please say anything you want. I just can’t stand the silence anymore.” She wrapped her arms around herself as if in protection of what might come next.

Sure, there’d been times throughout the years when Colleen had practiced the speech she should have uttered in the back hallway of that church with the champagne puddling at their feet and soaking through her ballet slippers. Once, Colleen had learned the word “heartseer,” which meant the pain of missing someone so desperately that it felt like an illness. For years, that word was the one she used to describe how she felt about her sister, and of course Walter.

On sleepless nights when she missed the rushing song of the river outside her window, when she wanted to weep, Colleen would replay the scene in the back hallway of the church, and in her imaginings she’d always found the words she could have said—always new, always fresh and never spoken.