“Maybe what?”

“You’d decide to give him a second chance, Jax. You’re far too young to be playing old maid. He was a good one.”

This was too much.

“You never even met him!”

“And whose fault is that?” she asked. “You two were together what, like three years on and off, and you never once brought him home.”

I stiffened. This was one of the many ongoing arguments I’d had with Phil before I finally had the sense to break things off. I wouldn’t let him meet my family. I was too closed off. Not willing to commit or make myself emotionally vulnerable.

I wouldn’t even let him come with me to Gram’s funeral.

“Don’t you think that’s more than a little fucked up, Jackie?” he’d asked. “How are we supposed to move forward with this relationship with all these careful walls you build around parts of your life? Jesus, you know everything about my family, and I know next to nothing about yours.”

But these were learned behaviors, as Barbara aptly pointed out in our weekly sessions. Defense mechanisms after a lifetime with Lexie, when I had no room in my life for friends or boyfriends. I learned at a young age not to bring anyone home because she might lash out, do something awful, or tell them an unbearable secret or an out-and-out lie. When I was in fifth grade, I made the mistake of having a slumber party and inviting four girls from school. Lexie took over the evening and ended up confiding in the guests—quietly thanking them for coming. “You must be real friends to risk your own health for her,” she said. The poor girls, including my then best friend, Zoey Landover, sat wide-eyed while Lexie told them about some horrible, incurable, possibly contagious disease I had. She threw out a bunch of medical-sounding terms, and implied that it was something embarrassing that affected private parts. I tried to argue, to tell them it was all a lie, and Lex gave me a look of pity and said, “If they’re your real friends, shouldn’t they know the truth?” All four girls were calling for rides home before it even got dark.

“How can you be so mean?” I asked Lexie later, when it was just the two of us alone in the little bedroom we shared.

She smiled sweetly, stroked my hair. “I did you a favor, Jax. It was a test. To see who was really a true friend. And not one of them passed.”

Lexie always made me choose between my friends and her, and in the end, I’d always chosen Lexie.

Even after moving all the way across the country to try to distance myself, to focus on my own life; even after years of therapy and the boundaries I’d worked so hard to develop, Lexie still had that strong of a hold over me.

“I’m happy on my own, thank you very much,” I told Diane. “Besides, work is crazy. I don’t have time for romance. I can barely keep my plants alive, much less a relationship.”

“Sure. Keep telling yourself that. All work and no play makes Jax a dull girl.”

“Anyway, back to Lexie…” I said.

“I was just at Sparrow Crest two weeks ago. Your sister seemed fine. Happy.”

“Have you spoken to her since?” I asked.

“No,” Diane admitted with what may have been a tinge of guilt in her voice. “I’ve been crazy busy with work. And like I said, she was doing really well when I last saw her.”

“Well, something has changed, so a visit today would not be a bad idea if you have the time.”

“She seemed really together, honestly… she made me lemonade with fresh mint she’d picked. All the family albums were out. She had lots of questions about your grandmother, your mother, and Rita. She’s doing research, working on a family tree. Maybe that’s what she was calling you about?”

I was not going to debate Lexie’s mental state with Diane. “Just talk her into getting back on the meds again. If she gives you any shit, remind her how much she hates hospitals and that going down this no-meds path always lands her in one.”

“Will do.”

After we said our goodbyes, I pulled out my laptop to get caught up on my client notes for the week. I couldn’t focus. I kept thinking about Lexie learning the butterfly when she was ten years old and already an exquisite swimmer. That was what Gram said: Alexia, you are an exquisite swimmer.

When we were kids, Lexie was one of those people who excelled at whatever she tried. She made everything look easy: math, science, knitting, any sport or game she tried. She’d cook something, and it would turn out perfectly and our family would ooh and ahh and say how delicious it was even though she hadn’t followed the recipe at all. “You’re a natural,” our father would say, and my stomach would clench into a hard knot because Lexie was a natural at everything, while I struggled just to get by, to get passing grades, just to get noticed. My sister was everyone’s favorite: teachers, our parents, Gram, even our friend Ryan, who made no attempt to hide the fact that he’d been totally in love with her since he was eight years old. It was easy to love Lexie. To be caught up in her radiance.

Lexie mastered the butterfly like she mastered everything: by throwing herself into it and closing everything else off. She was in the pool, windmilling her arms, dunking her face, coming up for a breath, then going back down again. Gram had given her a Speedo swimming cap because that’s what swimmers in the Olympics wore, and Lexie claimed it made her faster. She had blue-tinted goggles on, too. I sat perched on the edge of the pool, watching. When she was in the water, she wasn’t like my sister at all. The Lexie on land was like a real butterfly, flitting from one thing to the next, staying focused only long enough to briefly excel, then growing bored and moving on. But when she swam, she was pure grace and focus. She’d lost track of time and had been in way over Gram’s thirty-minute limit. She didn’t seem to feel the cold. She didn’t seem to get tired.

My legs turned to pins and needles, but I sat with my eyes on my sister, transfixed.

Her face, arms, and chest rose out of the water, her legs working in perfect dolphin kicks. Her body moved like a wave, undulating. And I thought, watching her, that my sister wasn’t moving through the water, but that she was a part of it. And I was terrified—that she could slip away so easily, choosing the water instead of me, never looking back.

* * *

The phone rang a little after five o’clock.

“Hello?”