Aly stared at him. As usual, she had applied her makeup sporadically, as if she’d lost interest halfway through the process. Her blond hair was drawn back into a messy ponytail that hung a little to the left. He had no idea if that was intentional. She was beautiful in the natural, rough-hewn way of Alaskan girls, who were more likely to hunt on the weekends than go to a shopping mall or movie theater.

“You’re doing it again,” he said.

“What?”

“Watching me. Like you think I’m going to explode or something.”

“No,” she said, trying to smile. “It’s just … you know. Are you having a bad day?”

Matthew closed his eyes, sighed. His older sister had been his salvation; there was no doubt about that. Back when he’d first moved here, when he’d been unable to deal with his grief and been beset by terrible nightmares, Aly had been his steadying hand, the voice that could get through to him. Although it had taken time. For the first three months, he pretty much hadn’t talked at all. The therapist they sent him to was no help. He’d known from the first session that it wouldn’t be a stranger’s hand he’d reach out to, especially not one who talked to him as if he were a kid.

It was Aly who had saved him. She never gave up, never stopped asking how he felt. When he finally found the words to express himself, his grief had shown itself to be bottomless, terrifying.

He still cringed at the way he’d cried.

His sister had held him when he cried, rocked him as their mother would have done. Over the years, the two of them had fashioned a vocabulary for grief, learned how to talk about their loss. He and Aly had talked about their pain until there were no words left to say. They’d also spent hours in silence, standing side by side on the river, fly-fishing, and hiking rough trails in the Alaska Range. In time, his grief had turned to anger and then drifted toward sorrow, and now, finally, it had settled into a lingering sadness that was a part of him, not the whole. Lately, they’d begun to talk about the future instead of the past.