“I can tell you what’s really going on.” He paused. “Nothing.”

“Good, then let’s find out.”

“It sure is nice having you here,” Gavin said as he stared out the window, his hands folded in his lap. “I always believed you’d come home, like the time you ran away as a little girl and returned hours later.”

“Dad.” Colleen’s chest tightened. “I didn’t run away when I was little.”

Hallie leaned forward from the backseat. “Oh, yes, you did. When Mother bought me a new pair of pink sneakers. You were so mad she didn’t get you a pair, although you didn’t need them, you packed up and left.”

“I never . . .” Colleen paused. Hell, she had, hadn’t she? She’d forgotten about how she’d filled her Barbie suitcase with all her sundresses and a bag of Goldfish crackers. “My sneakers were blue. I wanted pink ones.” She shook her head at the absurdity.

Hallie laughed with satisfaction, nudging the back of the driver’s seat with her knee. “I remember you stomping down the hallway dragging your little suitcase. I was screaming at you, crazy with fear that you would really leave but too scared to go with you. I’ll never forget it.”

“I came back once I ate all the Goldfish and my shoulders were so sunburned I thought I’d been lit on fire. I came home and you were huddled on the stairs exactly where I’d left you. I tripped over you in the dark.”

“We just can’t stay out of each other’s way, can we?” Hallie said. The sisters were quiet for a long moment, and inside that moment was childhood, and love.

Dad clapped his hand on the console. “We’re a family and families by nature cannot stay out of each other’s way.”

The truth filled the car and the remainder of the drive was easy and quiet as they listened to country music radio stations come and go along I-95. Dad talked about the local high school winning states in baseball and a long-gone Braves game from before Colleen was born. Hallie worked on her never-ending checklists—the RSVP list; the caterer’s food offerings; the outdoor furniture vendor who didn’t have enough chairs but would find some. She didn’t talk out loud about any of it, telling their dad it was school forms for her daughters. Meanwhile Colleen drove carefully, staring through the windshield, and heard her dad’s words over and over, caught and echoing in Hallie’s minivan.

Families by nature cannot stay out of each other’s way.

•   •   •

It had been a two-and-a-half-hour drive to MD Anderson in Jacksonville, Florida, and the offices inside gleamed like a new kitchen and smelled like disinfectant and Band-Aids, that particular aroma of childhood skinned knees.