She told me on the last day of school that she’d be going to Edinburgh for the break, and my heart dropped.

“What do you mean you’re going away?” I asked her, trying to stop the disappointment from creeping into my voice, the grimace from breaking through.

“Oh, I dunno Ryan. Take a really educated guess.”

“Shut up. How long will you be gone then?”

“I dunno. A week, maybe? Or more. Dad was…pretty upset. Not sure if that’s ‘cause his witch of a mother is dead or ‘cause we’ll have to see his sister—Oh stop it, Alex, you’re making a face.”

“Am not.”

“God, you’re not going to cry, are you?”

I snorted. “Please. I wouldn’t cry in a million years over anything, and not over you in infinity.”

Claire watched me in amusement. She took to calling my illness Connie-itis as if my immense moping coupled with constant pain was something akin to a joke. “What day is it now?” She asked every morning, “Eleven? Twelve?”

“As if I care what day it is. I don’t keep count,” I lied. Deep down, my heart went out to her, for lonely as I was in those weeks, I knew that Connie’s return was always imminent. Sometimes at night I would hear Claire come in and after a few minutes I’d crawl down the stairs to meet her, but always found her sitting at the kitchen table with her head bent over and cradled in her hands as if nursing a headache. I would stand and watch her from the doorway, waiting for her to notice me, and then her lips would stretch into a smile and she reprimand me for not being up so late. Sometimes she would never notice me and I would wander back to bed, dozing off. It didn’t take much to figure out just why she sat like that alone in the early hours of the morning, taking those quiet hours to mourn that part of her that had been stolen and would never be replaced.

My father was not someone I thought of very often and when I did it was mostly only in relation to Claire. His absence in my life was not notable, really. How was I to miss someone I had never known? But I doubted a day went by that Claire did not think of the love she had lost. There had only ever been him for her, I learned, and that surprised me immensely. My mother was charismatic, attractive. She could have had her pick of men. And yet no other man came before him, or after. She had never even kissed another prior to meeting him.

“Were you saving your first kiss for someone special?” I asked her, and she snorted.

“If only it was as romantic as that. My parents were strict. Very strict. You’d not have liked them much.”

“Did they chaperone you or something, then?”

“Oh, no. They’d have to have let me out in the first place to chaperone me. My only friends in school were girls. Wasn’t allowed out with any boys. No dances, no dates. Especially after Jimmy ran off with that Protestant girl. You’d think I’d have gone wild when I escaped to college but…no. I met your dad. That was it for me, then.”