As we taxied to the gate in Salt Lake City, the cabin began to come back to life: people waking each other up, putting their shoes back on, and reassembling their carry-on luggage. Phones emerged from where they’d been stashed, and passengers scrolled through messages and called loved ones to let them know they’d landed.

I wasn’t so anxious to check my own phone. It had brought me too much bad news in recent years, and I’d come to cherish being disconnected. On some level I knew that the worst was yet to come. I wouldn’t say I’d had a premonition, only that some small part of me was always waiting for that call. Luke was picking us up from the airport, a peace offering. For two days I’d managed not to think about my problems with him, worry about my sister, or even think about skiing. But it was over now, and time to get back to real life.

I was vaguely aware of Blair beside me, pulling out his phone and watching it as it came to life. Then I felt his body stiffen next to mine and horror started creeping in.

“Blair,” I said, hearing my own voice as though from the bottom of a well. The fear that lived at the edge of my every waking moment now consumed my mind. The worst possible thing. But it was too absurd; no one should hear that kind of news sitting on an airport tarmac surrounded by strangers.

Blair reached over and took my hand. “Oh, Katie.”

Penny’s Rabbit Is Sick

HOW DO you lose yourself? It is all at once, in a flash? Or is it as slow and irreversible as the melting of a glacier—so that by the time the once-solid core of you has diminished to a handful of fragile crystals, the chance to do anything about it is long past? It seems to me that you lose yourself quickly, and that you lose others little by little.

The question I keep trying to answer is, when exactly did we start to lose her?

Penny was as constant a part of my childhood as the acres of forest behind our house in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. We were born only twenty-two months apart, and like most siblings so close in age, we both discovered and created the reality of our childhood as a pair. I looked to Penny to help me make sense of things, to explain the world to me from her position just up ahead.