Chapter 7 — The Warning

That evening Brandon sat in the plastic chair beside his sister’s bed in the pediatric cardiac unit — the chair he’d sat in so many nights that his body knew its exact shape — and he told Sierra she was going to get her surgery.

She didn’t believe him at first. She was fourteen and she had learned, the way sick children learn, not to hope out loud. So he told her again, slowly, and he told her about Mr. Benedict, leaving out the parts a fourteen-year-old didn’t need, and he watched her understand that it was real.

She started to cry, and then he was crying too, and she pressed her face into his shoulder the way she had when she was small, and their mother, who had been standing in the doorway with a cup of vending-machine coffee going cold in her hands, sat down heavily in the other chair and covered her mouth.

For the first time in longer than Brandon could remember, that night, the three of them talked about the future — about the surgery, about after the surgery, about a version of Sierra’s life that had a September in it, and a next year, and a year after that.

Their mother spoke about it without her voice breaking. That, more than anything, told Brandon the ground had actually shifted.

He should have been more careful going home.