“She’s sick,” Dave said, and his voice cracked clean in half. “It’s bad. It’s been bad for a while. She didn’t have anybody, and she was too ashamed to come to you after everything. She made me swear.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “I couldn’t let her be alone in some hospice with strangers. I’m sorry. I should’ve told you. I didn’t know how.”

The dinner he hadn’t touched. The shirts in the closet because he stayed over when she had bad nights. The restaurant, because she’d told him once it was the only happy memory she had of the four of us, before everything went wrong. He took her there so she could have it one more time. The man I’d spent all night calling a cheater had been driving across town for eighteen months to sit with the sister I threw away.

I got in the car. He told me which room, the cancer ward at Mercy, and he tried to come with me but I said I had to go alone. I drove the whole way gripping that stupid framed photo in my lap. I had a hundred things planned to say to her. I’m sorry. I was wrong. Please. Come home.

I got there at 9:40 at night. The nurse at the desk had a face I’ll be seeing for the rest of my life. She’d passed at 7:15. About the same time I was setting Dave’s plate down and making him say her name.

So no, there’s no neat ending here. I never got to say a single word to her. I sit with that photo on my own nightstand now. Dave still kisses my cheek at 6:30, and I let him, because he was the only one of us who didn’t quit on her.

The jasmine was right there the whole time. My own mother’s smell, on my own sister, and I was too busy hunting for a stranger to recognize her.