The other photo Trevor remembered was one from Halloween, ten years earlier, the two of us scowling in the kitchen, side by side, about to tear each other’s heads off. I had insisted, despite my mother’s warnings, that Kelli and I go trick-or-treating as Siamese twins — and this, of course, had been a disaster. Five minutes after Irene had wrestled us into our shared costume and snapped the photo, we were screaming at each other and Kelli was dragging me across the room — she in one leg of our oversized pair of twin-pants, me helpless in the other — so she could sit at the window and rock her aggravation away. I ended up going out trick-or-treating myself, wearing the giant costume, one empty pant-leg flying in my wake, explaining to people I was a Siamese twin whose sibling had just been surgically cut away — and that I was “so much happier now.”

“You were cute kids,” offered Trevor. “The two of you standing there, all pissed off.” He was being kind, softening me up for what was to come.

“But you must’ve thought,” I blurted, “I was such a bad daughter to Irene.”

Trevor leaned back and considered his words. “I just wondered where you were. Your mother —”

I jerked forward. “My mother never told me anything.” I knew I sounded like I was pleading. “I checked in with her every month . . . or so. She never told me what was going on. I asked. But, I mean, she was so shut down. I didn’t push. I should’ve. We were both shut down. We had this fight when I was twenty and we never really —”

“She told me about the fight,” said Trevor.

Now I leaned back. “She did?”

“And I said to her, Rini, for Jesus’ sake, pardon my French. The girl was twenty years old when you had that spat. Do you know how much stupid shit I was going around spouting when I was twenty?”

“And you said that because,” I said slowly, “she still hadn’t forgiven me for what I said back then.”

Trevor leaned over to place his drink on the coffee table.

“Miss — sorry. Karie. Karie. You two — ok, I’m gonna tell you what I said to her. You just forgot how to talk to each other after that. You hurt each other’s feelings so bad you spent the rest of your lives trying not to do it again. So you both ended up just not saying anything for the next twenty years.”

“Twenty years,” I repeated, “is such a long — such a stupidly long fucking time.”

Neither of us had to add: especially when one of you has cancer.

I slurped my drink and realized, as I did, that at some point I’d switched from carefully measuring out my sips to make sure I stayed in control to taking a gulp whenever I felt like I needed a dose of strength, of courage. And that, I fuzzily concluded, had been a flawed policy, the upside-down logic of someone becoming drunk, because, the more I drank, the more limp and tremulous I felt — not strong. Not courageous. My strength was draining away, not shoring itself up, with every sip I took.