“Even to make it though!” she said. I nodded, though of course, being an also-ran didn’t count for much, not for the sponsors, and not for me. It felt like every year, every season went by faster than the last. I’d been mercifully spared any catastrophic injuries, but the wear and tear added up over the years: tendonitis, torn muscles. I was twenty-five: young in the world but getting up there in the skiing world. Every year, there was a new crop of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds coming up. There was a time when I would have been able to say all of this to Emily, but without knowing when or how, the window on that intimacy had closed. So instead I simply said, “Thank you.” She excused herself to go find Penny. I figured I’d catch up to her later. We’d planned the party to stretch on as long as needed into the early spring afternoon. I wanted to find a way to ask her about Penny, to see if she’d been feeling any of the disquiet I could no longer ignore. But before I could get the chance, she was on her way out.

“You’re leaving already?” I asked, catching her arm.

“Yeah, sorry, sissy. I just have so many papers to grade this afternoon.” Emily was now a seventh-grade English teacher, a challenging job for which her sweet and patient nature seemed uniquely well suited. “We’ll talk soon though, okay?”

She’d always felt like our third sister, but as I watched her head up the driveway to her car, I saw the truth: she wasn’t actually family. She could walk away. Maybe they always would have drifted apart; after all, even in small towns not everyone stays close with their childhood friends. But Emily had known Penny all her life, and maybe she felt it too, the wrongness. Emily and I had talked once and only once about the discrepancies in the stories Penny had told us about her previous pregnancy, and then, as if by mutual agreement, we’d closed the door on the incident. But now I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It hovered on the periphery of my mind no matter how hard I tried to push it away. I knew there was a line between Ava and those phantom babies, but I couldn’t bring myself to draw it.

How fierce is denial when acceptance means losing so much?