What I really wanted to tell Blair was not that I was angry, even though part of me was. Or that I still loved her, even though I did. Or that I understood, even though I was trying to.

I wanted to tell her I was sorry.

I’m sorry you fell and none of us caught you.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell Dad how scared I was the night you went to prom.

I’m sorry I believed you when you lied.

I’m sorry I thought you were too perfect to be struggling.

I’m sorry that I acted like you were a superstar instead of my sister.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I wrote them all out, apology after apology, my hand flying across the lines, my pencil practically digging into my notebook. I filled a page with regret and remorse. Then I tore it out, walked to the window, and ripped the letter into tinier and tinier pieces, letting them flutter to the ground. Sorry for littering. Add that one to the list. I would send my apologies to the trees and the birds and the lake and the woods itself, and maybe they’d burrow underground and find their way to my sister, sad and sick and stuck.

16

APRIL, FOUR YEARS AGO

Eight years old

Four years and four months before Jade eavesdropped on my plan, Dr. Leo Lacamoire was being honored at MIT with a Distinguished Professor award. He wore a tuxedo to the ceremony. He had made a breakthrough in new planetary discoveries this year, and although his past mistakes—and oh, he had made them!—clung to his memory, he could easily shove them out of his mind. He didn’t yet know that his Star-Gazer Twelve, stolen from him years before, was buried underground in Moose Junction, Wisconsin.

He didn’t know that the thief was dying.

But we aren’t at that part of the story yet. The story where I learn just how the Star-Gazer Twelve got from Dr. Leo Lacamoire’s observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a box in a tourist town. No, I’m only eight years old. I’m a third grader, learning how to add three-digit numbers and make connections from books to my own experience. Dad and I go to the park almost every night to look through his telescope.

Blair goes to the Sweet Toes Ballet School in Cedar Valley. She’s fourteen years old, and by far the best in her class. Everyone says so.

Their spring recital was boring. I almost fell asleep. You always think ballet is over, and then it keeps going and going and going. Mom let me bring Sophie, and we spent most of the night writing notes back and forth and giggling. When it was time for Blair to dance, we all sat still as stone. She was dynamite, as usual. I wished I was as good at something as Blair was at ballet, but I was pretty average in every way you could think of. I got good grades, and I could read quickly, but I couldn’t dance or draw or play sports. Jade bought Sophie and me candy with her own allowance money at intermission. We went downstairs and checked out the fancy bathrooms. Blair was usually busy now, taking ballet five nights a week, but Jade still looked out for me.