It’s a scene from a movie, I’m sure, because I know I do not remember. But the pain feels real. The loss. The deep, indescribable longing I feel at the thought of a brother. Filling in his seat at the dinner table, his presence next to me on the school bus. I think of the German fairy tale where the girl cuts off her finger to save her brothers who were turned into ravens. What wouldn’t I sacrifice to have him here with me now?

Colin sacrificed a part of himself to have brothers, I think, but that’s not quite right. He sacrificed his entire self for the idea of brothers, for grandiose slogans, and lofty principles that not one of the men at Kappa Phi Omicron met. And me? Didn’t I do the same thing? Believe I was part of something bigger, trained to serve and protect, when really, I was meant to serve a broken system and protect the people who broke it? I was wrong when I thought Truman’s letting the fraternity brothers go after what we found in the basement was justice giving a wink. Justice is blind because we blinded her. So we could choose whom to punish and whom to set free.

We’re quiet a long time.

Amina joins us. She sits next to me and wraps one arm around my shoulder.

After a while, she squeezes my hand. “I miss him, too,” she whispers.

I look into those familiar brown eyes, the way they crinkle at the edges, and begin to cry.

After the death of a loved one, some people wrap themselves in their old clothes. They close the door to their house to keep the ghost of their memory in. They surround themselves with photographs, cook their favorite meals, and continue to talk about the dead in the present tense. I did the opposite. After Craig died, I stripped every reminder of him from my life. I couldn’t take it—the guilt, the feeling that I should have been there, done more, not let the fraternity, my jealousy over his new brothers, separate us. I moved out of the dorm room where we shared Doritos and laughed until late in the evening, I left the university he convinced me to attend, and I avoided his mother, whose every gesture and full-throated laughter reminded me of him, but whose presence now is the only thing keeping me together.