I have not been in a room with my sister since I was thirteen years old and she was scrolling her phone while a doctor told our parents I was going to need three years of chemotherapy.

I recognized her instantly. That’s the part I wasn’t ready for. Eighteen years and I knew her from the shape of her shoulders before she looked up.

Megan stood.

She’s thirty-six now. She has our mother’s coloring and our father’s height and none of the gloss I’d assigned her in my head for two decades — she looked tired, and older than thirty-six, and she had gotten thin in the way people get thin when they’ve stopped noticing meals.

“I didn’t want to lie on your form,” she said. “It asks who you’re here to see and I couldn’t think of an honest way to write it.”

There were four people in that waiting room. A mother with a toddler on her hip. An old man with a cane. Two teenagers who were absolutely not siblings and absolutely there together.