Through the haze of anguish melting my insides, I saw Lupita reach for me. Juan caught her hand in his and shook his head. Thank god. If she had shown me any comfort, I would have broken down completely and assumed a fetal position on the floor. Jackson opened his mouth and then snapped it shut.

They left me, in my wheelchair, in the kitchen contemplating the ugliest cake I’d ever seen. It broke my fucking heart, and before I could push it down or hold it in, a sob tore through me, and I sat in that goddamn wheelchair and cried like I hadn’t cried since the day Lexi moved three thousand miles away to start a new life.

Today, I refused to cry. Instead, I wheeled my chair into the living room. No one came to check on me, sensing, rightly, that I needed to be alone. I contemplated the note in my lap. In my sister’s distinctive script—I’d gotten to know it quite well over the past few days—she’d written Nicky.

I expected a note inside. There wasn’t one. Just a picture of me in my dad’s cowboy hat and boots and Lexi in a Buzz Lightyear costume I’d made out of a box, Magic Markers, and some empty soda bottles. On the back, in Lexi’s handwriting, in fresh ink, it read, You’ve Got a Friend in Me. On the bottom in faded ink in different handwriting it read, Halloween 1996. It took me a second to realize the handwriting was mine.

Jackson was right. She wasn’t going to go away, but I couldn’t let her into my life like this. We’d been apart for twenty years. She clearly still saw me as her big brother, the one who could make everything all right, which was exactly why she was looking for my help with her housing project. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be less in her eyes now than I was then. It would kill me. But unless I took out a restraining order, she wasn’t going to stop. There had to be a better solution. There just had to be.

My neurologist answered on the third ring. “Nick, how are you?”

“Not good,” I said. It had taken me all of Thursday morning to work up the cojones to call him. “I need you to run more tests.”

“Why don’t you come in and we’ll talk,” he said.

Dr. Garth Henry was quite possibly the most patient person I’d ever met in my life. Ironically, his overabundance of patience seemed to fray the last little bits of mine.

“What is there to talk about?” I asked. “There’s still something wrong with me. You need to do some tests and tell me what it is. Then you can fix it.”

“Eleven o’clock on Monday then?” he asked.