Two Sisters, One Roof — Chapter 1

The house was smaller than either of them remembered, which was the specific and unfair trick that childhood homes always played on people who’d been gone too long.

They stood in the front hall — three siblings who had not been in the same room together in over two years — surrounded by boxes that had, until last week, still held their mother’s whole life inside them.

“We don’t have to do this today,” the youngest said, which was, everyone understood, exactly the kind of thing you said when you desperately wanted someone else to insist otherwise.

No one insisted otherwise. But no one left, either.

By the second box, they had found a letter no one recognized. By the fourth, they had stopped speaking almost entirely, each of them quietly doing the math on what else their mother might have kept from all three of them, together, for years.