“No,” she snapped. “Did it ever occur to you that I’ve been trying to drum up the courage for years to come and see you?”

I put on my bored face. She was not going to bamboozle me. She could have approached me anytime over the past twelve years, when she was officially an adult, and yet she never had.

“Well, you’re here now,” I said. “So what do you want?”

“I want my brother back,” she said.

We stared at each other. What was I supposed to say? We couldn’t just erase a twenty-year absence of birthdays, holidays, vacations, and the day-to-day cap on, seat down, who ate my yogurt issues that were the bedrock of being a family.

“I can’t help you with that,” I said.

I heard Jackson hiss a breath. I could have drowned in the disapproval pouring off him. I opted to hold my breath.

“That’s it?” Lexi asked. She began to pace the room.

She looked devastated, as if everything she had feared about approaching me had come to pass. Not gonna lie. It made me feel like shit. Still, I didn’t say anything, which was fine as it turned out she wasn’t done.

“You don’t have anything else to say to me? No ‘Hey, Lexi, I’ve missed you, too. Sorry I never reached out’?” She stopped pacing and planted her hands on her hips, staring down at me from across the coffee table.

“Reach out? Are you serious?” I snapped. I wished with everything I had that I could stand up. I couldn’t risk it. The muscles in my leg still felt weak even as the tingling in my hands faded. I was not about to do a face-plant in front of her. I didn’t have a lot of the old me left, but I had my pride.

I supposed that was wrong, but that pride had gotten me through some very bleak times and kept me from following my parents into the quicksand of bad decisions. It also stoked the fire in my belly to prove myself, to be somebody to the foster dad who called me worthless and slapped me so hard, my ear rang for a week when I accidentally scratched the back bumper of his piece of shit ancient minivan with my bike. And to the foster mother who liked to call me into the bathroom when she “forgot” a towel, laughing when my adolescent body betrayed me and responded to the sight of her naked and wet. Yes, those were the “parents” I hoped choked on my success. But the ones I wanted to suffer above all others were my real parents, the ones who’d abandoned me and my sister to the system when they decided getting sober for their kids was just too hard.