taught me that everyone I loved left in some way, shape, or form anyway.
“Get out.”
“No.” She shook her head, straightening her back and with the most resolute expression on her face, she stepped toward me.
There she was. My fighter. Her strength was incredible. On any other day, I’d admire the hell out of her for it. Now, with my blood pounding in my ears and tightening my muscles, I feared being alone with her.
Instead, I let her stand there, watching me fall apart. Who gave a shit. If I didn’t push her away, someday she’d leave too.
“Suit yourself,” I muttered right before I turned back to the fucking wall Melissa insisted on creating. It’d taken days. Weeks. I painstakingly hung every damn picture on this stupid wall for her, placing each exactly where she wanted. My sister was demanding. Sweet as hell, the purist woman I’d ever met to the core outside my mom. But she was demanding. And she knew I’d do whatever she asked.
I have cancer.
My dad’s word bounced around my brain, shooting fire and heat and pain to my limbs and straight to my soul, to my heart. My hands, still fisted, glared at these pictures of happy, smiling people. Me with Melissa. Melissa with six foster kids we had in our home at one point. All of them smiling. Like they were actually happy and weren’t getting ready to go back to horrific circumstances because courts cared more about families than the safety of children.
I had no idea how long I stared at all the photos I hadn’t yet swiped and destroyed and left tattered at my feet, but I knew Lilly stayed behind me, watching, waiting for me to turn to her.
To need her.
With a sudden rush of another wave of pain and fury, I slammed my hands to the wall, shoved them to the side and sent another dozen pictures and newspaper clippings into the air like snowflakes.
Her soft steps came to me, at my side. “What is all of this?”
Her voice was a whisper. Once soothing, it now grated.
She’d known. She could have prepared me for this. Instead, she did exactly what I’d done to her. Waited until Dad handled it.
What a goddamn mistake it’d all been.
I heaved a breath, trying to expel all my anger into the air instead of at Lilly. I loved her, and none of this was her fault. Not really. It certainly wasn’t her fault that fate sought to tear away all the people I loved throughout my life like some kind of cosmic, sick joke.
“Your dad’s cancer is slow growing and beatable. It’s not like Melissa’s from what he said,” she said, somehow able to read my mind. “You should listen to what he has to say.”
“I can’t.” I shook my head. My gaze bounced over the pictures, some of us as children, Melissa with her sorority sisters at Iowa. They had bright yellow Hawkeye stickers on their cheeks, waving black and gold pompoms. We’d always done everything together, including go to the same college.
Shoving my hands to my hips to keep from ripping away more of my sister’s memories and life, I swallowed.
“In the end, when she couldn’t leave the room, she said she wanted to spend the days with everyone she ever loved.”
“You made this for her.”
I sneered at all of them. Hundreds of them still stuck to the lime green painted wall. Pictures of our mom, family, foster kids of all ages and colors and sizes and genders with Melissa’s arms wrapped around all of them like she’d loved every single person she ever met.
I searched until I found the one I was looking for. The one that set all of this in motion. “You’re there.” I shoved a finger toward one upper corner and glanced at her out of the corner of my eye.
God, she was beautiful. Even as her face paled when she caught sight of what I pointed to.
“What?”
She pressed her hand to her chest. How could she be so surprised given what she now knew? I’d been tortured with that innocent smile and those shining eyes from a photograph years before we met. She was young in the photo, her brother’s arm draped over her shoulders. Melissa had searched for hours online to find a picture of her and Josh together. Something that wasn’t her initial mugshot.
“Signing day.” Her voice shook as she talked to herself more than me. “My parents were there, media, photographers. Everyone wanted to know where