Here was a person who had known me longer than anyone alive — who had seen me lose my first tooth and learn to drive and get married, who had been, for the first eighteen years of my life, simply a fixed feature of the world, as unremarked and permanent as a wall — and I was making small talk with him about estate-sale logistics, choosing my words like a woman negotiating with a stranger’s lawyer.

We had become foreign to each other, and the foreignness sat on top of the deepest intimacy two people can have, and the two things did not cancel out; they coexisted, horribly, so that every careful sentence carried under it the ghost of a thousand uncareful ones we used to trade without thinking.

I kept catching myself starting to be easy with him — the old reflex, the shorthand of siblings — and then remembering, and pulling back into the polite flatness, and I could see him doing the same thing, the two of us flinching away from our own instincts, because to be easy with each other now would be to pretend the nine years hadn’t happened, and neither of us was willing to grant the other that particular lie.

So we were careful.