We had ourselves a real plan, see. Tough love, that’s the fancy name we gave it. We told each other we were doing the hard thing for her own good. I’d let her calls ring out and feel sick to my stomach and then tell myself it was for the best.

My own sister, three in the morning, scared and hurting, and I let that phone ring. I keep landing on that no matter where my mind starts. I let it ring.

She got thinner and thinner. Some days her face would puff up and I thought, lord, she’s been drinking. Her hair started coming out in the shower, she told me once before we quit really talking. And there was this rash across both her cheeks, kind of pink, sort of spread out. I figured it was the booze or the stress. I didn’t say a word. By then we were down to a text here and there. “I’m fine,” she’d write. She was not fine. Not a single one of us went looking.

Then last month the call came. Not from her. From a number I didn’t know. A young woman had found my sister collapsed flat on the floor at the Walmart, right there in aisle 7 by the canned goods, while folks just stepped around her and kept shopping. A total stranger was the one who called 911. They took her to a different hospital this time, a whole other town, because that’s where the ambulance found a bed. I drove over thinking, here we go again, another ER, another lecture coming. I am so ashamed of that now too.

This time was different though. There was a new doctor on shift, a younger woman, and she actually sat down. Pulled a little stool right up next to the bed instead of standing over her. “Where does it hurt?” she asked.

And my sister, who could barely keep her eyes open, said it the exact same way she’d said it to me a hundred times. “Everywhere. All the time. Three years now.” I sat there waiting for that doctor to write the same word everybody always wrote. She didn’t. She just nodded and said, “Okay. Let’s find out why.”

She ordered a whole pile of blood work. All of it. I didn’t even know what half of it was. CBC, and something called an ANA, and markers for swelling, I think. We sat in that room four hours. Wendy slept the whole time. I held her hand and I knew good and well I didn’t deserve to be the one holding it. I kept staring at that pink rash on her cheeks and at her skinny little wrists, and somewhere in there I think I already knew. We’d been wrong. Wrong for years.