I don’t trust him—I can’t, not with Angela’s warning. But I need him to help me learn what happened to my sister. There’s no way I can navigate the city or my sister’s French life for the next two days without someone who knew her, but why doesn’t he shut up and make this easier? Why does he need to feel explicitly accepted?

In the eighth grade, Angela impersonated me when I had to give a presentation required to graduate middle school. I’ve never felt the comfort she always did in front of a camera or a crowd of people, and I also suck at asking for help. Rather than let me puke on my shoes, she stepped into them without my asking and helped us both progress to the next level. Seb, on the other hand, won’t volunteer without me making the first move.

Be nice, I tell myself. Be like Angela.

I clear my throat to speak. “I’m sure she felt the same way about you. She always chose good people to be around.”

The bunched frown releases slightly. “Thank you, Shayna. Losing a sibling is a terrible loss I have known. I am only here to help.”

Heat climbs my neck. For the first time in years, the pain of my estranged relationship with Angela fully throbs in my heart. It becomes clearer with each awkward pause that Seb knows my sister in all the ways I didn’t bother to learn. Talking about her like this, seeing her emotional effect on someone else, reminds me of how wonderful our relationship could be when we weren’t fighting. Before all the bad words, hard to take back and even harder to forget, were uttered in the wake of our parents’ deaths.

Angela always took after our auntie Meredith, our father’s sister, notorious for turning any afternoon into an emotional hurricane. When we were nine, Angela kicked a hole in her closet when she wasn’t allowed to ride her bike; at fourteen, she cried so hard she gave herself a bloody nose when she didn’t get the lead in the school play; at seventeen, she sat in our childhood tree house wailing, in protest of our parents missing her performance at a theater festival because they would be on vacation. It was during a premed psych class that I started to wonder if Angela and Aunt Meredith were both somewhere on the spectrum of emotional imbalance—maybe bipolar—though they were never formally diagnosed.