The anger that had driven me out had cooled long ago into a kind of dull settled distance, and I had told myself that the distance was healthy, that some family bonds are so damaging that the loving thing is to sever them.

Maybe that had even been true, for a while.

But standing in that hallway with his number on the screen of a borrowed phone, I understood that whatever the silence had once protected me from, it had also cost me my only brother, and that I had been paying that cost for nine years without ever once letting myself feel it.

“Arthur,” I said, and I was surprised to find my voice steady.