He knew her cup had to be the green one.

He watched her on the stairs.

When she woke crying in the night I would come out of my room to find him already there, six years old on his knees by her bed, patting her back and murmuring the exact tired soothing nonsense a worn-out parent murmurs, because somewhere in the three years I wasn’t there he had appointed himself the person responsible for keeping his sister alive, and he had done the job, and the doing of it had quietly eaten his childhood.

I did not take it away from him all at once.