“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

find a frequency without needing to be introduced to it, calibrating, settling, arriving somewhere without ceremony.

She looked slightly relieved, like something she hadn’t known she was carrying had been set down.

We said goodbye in the parking lot.

Ethan got the car, and Cassidy and I stood in the January cold, hands in our coat pockets, the air holding continue reading …