Over his shoulder, I could still see the house. My house. The porch light flickered with the same tired buzz it had carried since I was a kid. I used to fix that light every summer. I used to cut the grass, repaint the shutters, fill the cracks in the driveway. I used to know where every creak in that place came from.
I used to belong there.
Now I didn’t even belong on the porch.
My sister Madison leaned against the hallway wall behind him, sipping an iced coffee like this was something worth watching.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You actually showed up like that?”
Like that.
Not “you’re home.”
Not “you made it back.”
Just like that.
I wasn’t family returning from war. I was an inconvenience arriving in the wrong shape.
“I told you this would happen,” she added, not even trying to lower her voice. “Dad, I literally warned you. He’s going to need help and make everything weird.”
Weird.
That word hit harder than the rest.
Daniel scratched at his stomach through his flannel shirt and planted himself wider in the doorway, as if I might try to force my way past him.
“We don’t have the space,” he said. “Madison just redid the upstairs. You know how life is. It moves on.”
Life moves on.