Lyla arrived with four bags for a ten day trip, which was either a packing philosophy or a cry for help and I didn't ask which.

Enzo arrived with one backpack and the specific energy of someone who had been waiting to do something for a long time and was now doing it and was trying very hard not to show how much it mattered. He failed at this immediately, stepping out of the taxi and stopping on the pavement and just looking at me for a moment before saying, very quietly for someone who was usually loud: "Hi."

"Hi," I said.

He hugged me. Properly, both arms, the way Kai had in the garden, and I stood there and let it happen and thought about how strange it was that being held by people who loved you felt different each time depending on who was doing it, and how you could need all of them in different ways at once.

"You look good," he said, when he let go. He was checking, obviously, running the quick assessment that people did when they hadn't seen you in a while and were trying to gauge the distance between what they'd imagined and what was real.

"I feel pretty good actually," I said. "Relatively speaking."

"Relatively speaking," he repeated. "Okay. I'll take it."

Lyla had already gone inside, which we discovered because we could hear her from the pavement — Isha getting the full biographical tour of everyone in our London friend group before she'd even put her bags down, Isha responding with the patient amusement of someone who had heard a lot of Olivia stories second-hand and was now receiving them in person at high volume.

We looked at each other.

"She was like this the entire flight," Enzo said.

"I know," I said. "That's just Lyla."

"I know," he said. "I've known her for four years. I'm just saying."

We went inside.

The house had a different quality with all of them in it.

Fuller. Louder. The kind of full that wasn't crowded so much as layered, several different conversations happening at different volumes in different rooms, the kitchen smelling of something Aunt Reneta was making that drew people toward it without anyone deciding to move. Kai came over that evening because I texted him and because he seemed to understand that the correct response to my friends just arrived was to show up rather than stay away.

Lyla identified him in approximately thirty seconds.

I watched it happen. She came out of the kitchen with a glass of water and saw him standing in the doorway and looked at me and looked back at him and then at me again, and her face did about fourteen things in quick succession without making a sound, which for Lyla was genuinely impressive restraint.

"Hi," she said, to him. Very warm. Suspiciously warm.

"Hi," he said, with the mild wariness of someone who could tell they were being assessed.

"I'm Lyla. I've heard nothing about you, which tells me everything."

"Lyla," I said.

"What? It's a compliment. It means she was keeping you to herself." She smiled at him. "Which means you matter."

Kai looked at me.

I looked at the ceiling.

Enzo, to his credit, just shook Kai's hand and said "good to meet you" like a normal person, and then they got into a conversation about football that lasted forty minutes and from which I was entirely excluded, which was fine because it meant I got to sit next to Lyla on the sofa and have her grip my arm and say things very quietly into my ear that I am not going to repeat.

Dinner was chaotic in the best possible way. Aunt Reneta had made enough food for considerably more than seven people, which Isha said was just how she cooked and always had been. Enzo asked about every dish before he tried it and then ate three servings of each, which Aunt Reneta found so gratifying that she kept adding things to his plate without asking. Lyla and Isha had found each other in the way that certain people find each other immediately, with the specific recognition of two people who communicate primarily through observation and commentary, and their running conversation at one end of the table was providing a kind of ambient entertainment that the rest of us were half-listening to without joining.

Kai sat beside me. At some point during dinner his hand found mine under the table. He didn't make anything of it. Just held on.

I looked at my plate and felt something so full it didn't have a word.

Later that night, after the others had drifted to their rooms or to the television in the living room, after Kai had gone home through the hedge and Enzo had fallen asleep in the armchair in a way that suggested he hadn't slept properly on the plane, I went to get water from the kitchen.

Momma and Aunt Reneta were already there.

Not arguing. Not in the careful, polite medium of their usual conversations either. Just sitting at the kitchen table with two cups of tea that had probably gone cold, and talking in the low, unguarded way of people who have finally decided to stop managing each other.

I stopped in the corridor.

I should have gone back upstairs. I know that. But something in the quality of the silence between their sentences held me there, the specific texture of a conversation that had been waiting a long time to happen.

"I didn't know how to be your sister," Momma was saying. "I didn't even know if I was allowed to call you that. We got there so differently. You'd already been there for years when I arrived. You had a room and a place at the table and a way of doing things. I felt like I was interrupting something."

Aunt Reneta was quiet for a moment.

"I thought you didn't want to be there," she said. "You were so self-contained. I thought you'd decided you didn't need any of us."

"I was twelve," Momma said. "I didn't know how to need people in a way that showed."

"Neither did I," Aunt Reneta said. "I was fifteen and terrified you'd take something that was mine, which was a terrible thing to feel and I knew it was terrible and I couldn't stop feeling it."

A pause.

"What did you think I'd take?" Momma asked.

"Their attention," Aunt Reneta said simply. "They'd waited so long for another child and then you arrived and you were—" She stopped. "You were so easy to love, Helen. You didn't even try to be and you just were. I watched them look at you and I thought, that's it, I've been replaced, and then I hated myself for thinking it because you hadn't done anything wrong."

The silence stretched.

I pressed my back against the wall of the corridor and didn't move.

"I didn't know," Momma said, finally. "I had no idea you felt any of that. You seemed so sure of yourself. So settled."

"I was performing it," Aunt Reneta said. "I'd had three years of practice by then."

"God." Momma let out a breath that sounded like something releasing. "We were both performing."

"For decades," Aunt Reneta said. Dry, but not unkind.

Momma laughed. A small, tired, genuine laugh.

"I'm sorry," she said. "For not trying harder. When we were older and it might have been easier. I just kept thinking there was time."

"There is time," Aunt Reneta said. Firmly. "Helen. There is still time."

Another silence. Different from the others. Softer.

"When you called me," Aunt Reneta said. "When you told me about Olivia. I thought, this is it. This is the thing that will matter more than whatever nonsense we've been carrying. And I wanted to be useful. I didn't know how to say that without it sounding like — I didn't know how to just say it."

"You said it," Momma said quietly. "By opening the door."

I heard, very faintly, the sound of a hand placed over another hand on a table.

I went back upstairs without the water.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and thought about two girls in a house, twelve and fifteen, both performing certainty they didn't have, both waiting for the other one to close a distance that neither of them knew the other one also wanted to close.

Decades of that.

And then a phone call about a sick daughter, and a spare room, and a door opened.

I thought about how long it took sometimes. For people to find each other. Even when they'd been in the same house the whole time.

I thought about how much time it cost to wait.Lyla arrived with four bags for a ten day trip, which was either a packing philosophy or a cry for help and I didn't ask which.

Enzo arrived with one backpack and the specific energy of someone who had been waiting to do something for a long time and was now doing it and was trying very hard not to show how much it mattered. He failed at this immediately, stepping out of the taxi and stopping on the pavement and just looking at me for a moment before saying, very quietly for someone who was usually loud: "Hi."

"Hi," I said.

He hugged me. Properly, both arms, the way Kai had in the garden, and I stood there and let it happen and thought about how strange it was that being held by people who loved you felt different each time depending on who was doing it, and how you could need all of them in different ways at once.

"You look good," he said, when he let go. He was checking, obviously, running the quick assessment that people did when they hadn't seen you in a while and were trying to gauge the distance between what they'd imagined and what was real.

"I feel pretty good actually," I said. "Relatively speaking."

"Relatively speaking," he repeated. "Okay. I'll take it."

Lyla had already gone inside, which we discovered because we could hear her from the pavement. Isha getting the full biographical tour of everyone in our London friend group before she'd even put her bags down, Isha responding with the patient amusement of someone who had heard a lot of Olivia stories second-hand and was now receiving them in person at high volume.

We looked at each other.

"She was like this the entire flight," Enzo said.

I lay down on the bed and looked at the ceiling and made a decision, quietly, without ceremony, that I was not going to waste any more of mine.

The next morning, Lyla hijacked the kitchen.

This was not a figure of speech. She arrived downstairs at eight with a list she had written in her notes app, asked Isha to show her where everything was, and proceeded to make an extremely ambitious breakfast for seven people with the confidence of someone who had absolutely no business being this competent before nine in the morning.

"You can cook?" I said, from the doorway.

"I have hidden depths," she said, without looking up from whatever she was doing to an egg.

"Since when?"

"Since lockdown. I got very into it. I have a sourdough starter named Gerald."

"You named your sourdough starter."

"He's been through a lot."

Enzo appeared behind me in the doorway, saw the scene, and immediately went to sit at the table with the instinct of someone who knew when to stay out of the way.

"Smart," I said.

"I've known her for four years," he said.

Aunt Reneta arrived in the kitchen, took in the situation, and instead of doing the thing most people would do in their own kitchen, which was assert control over it, she simply got herself coffee and sat down at the table next to Enzo and watched with the expression of someone who found this extremely entertaining.

Isha sat beside her.

"She's good," Isha said, watching Lyla navigate the hob like it personally owed her something.

"She really is," Aunt Reneta agreed.

Kai arrived through the back door at some point, which he'd started doing so naturally that no one remarked on it anymore, took one look at the situation, poured himself coffee, and sat down.

Momma came downstairs last, slightly puffy-eyed in a way that I noticed and didn't mention, and went straight to the coffee, and when Aunt Reneta looked up at her from the table she gave her a small nod, private and deliberate, and Aunt Reneta gave one back, and that was that.

The beginning of a different kind of ordinary.

Lyla put plates down in front of everyone with the satisfaction of someone who had executed a plan.

"Right," she said. "Eat."

Nobody argued.

Outside the window, Singapore was already at full volume, warm and green and completely unbothered, and inside the kitchen there were seven people eating breakfast that someone had made with care, and two sisters sitting at the same table without the decades between them taking up quite as much space as they used to.

I looked around the table.

At Enzo stealing something from Lyla's plate while she wasn't looking and then looking entirely innocent. At Isha explaining something to Kai that was making him smile. At Momma and Aunt Reneta not talking but not needing to, the quiet between them a different shape than it used to be.

I thought: look at this. Look at all of this.

I thought: Liam would have loved every single person at this table.

I thought: I know. I know he would.

And I picked up my fork, and I ate my breakfast, and I let it be exactly what it was.