The calls got shorter and then rarer.

The visits shrank to holidays and then to no holidays.

And somewhere in the last couple of years, without either of us ever deciding it, we had simply stopped — a silence that started as busyness and hardened, month by month, into something that felt too large and too old to break.

By that spring, I had not spoken to my own brother in over a year.

I will be honest about the shape of what I felt toward him, because it was not simple.