They sit at the restaurant, laughing and talking and looking fondly at each other. The brother-sister bond that leads to hate and shatter is dissolved for the moment, and the bond that leads to trust and joy and share is in plain use. She is seventeen or so, and that’s about when the world begins to lighten up after the deep ensconcing darkness of the mid-teen years. Timothy has something on his face, it’s true, something he wears on his body beneath his clothes, but at a glance he looks all right, and Laurie has seen his weather so often that she’s forgotten it’s out of the ordinary.

A woman—well, hardly more than a girl—enters the restaurant. She wears pants. She always wears pants now. Her black eye is gone, and her scrapes have healed, but she has a scar on her hand from where a piece of glass on the ground cut her deeply and the blood squirted out on his shoulder and he’d had to cut up that shirt and burn it one day when everyone was down the hall playing Gary’s PS2 and he’d slipped down to the basement and wept and slammed his fist against the concrete wall, again, again, white-hot but not painful enough, while the flames curled up and sizzled the little pieces, the cells of her, white and red and lifeless.

She walks over to Timothy and Laurie and greets Laurie. Her smile cannot be anything but weary. Laurie hugs her long, love radiant from her. Timothy sits in his cloud, watching. He shakes hands with her, hears her name is Rachel, thinks he has hardly seen anyone more beautiful, ever. She apologizes for interrupting their dinner but she hasn’t seen Laurie in so long and she wanted to say hello while she was here in the flesh. Both seated parties wave this off and Timothy’s eyes flicker a little when they catch hers, she smiles tremblingly, looks back at Laurie, and is gone.

Timothy feels struck down by a wave. He grills Laurie and Laurie laughs and makes fun of Timothy for being so interested. She’s beautiful, he replies, and as a joke, I’ve never seen a woman wear slacks so well.

A shadow crosses Laurie’s face. She leans in and she says that terrible ripping word to him, prefacing it with the inevitable she was. She hasn’t worn a skirt since and I don’t think she ever will again.

He spins away. Back to a night in late April. A broken bottle on the concrete. Crickets singing that April showery song. A silk blouse…oh, he’d almost caught Her that time between the threads of silk that popped apart beneath his fingers. Her back was creamy and the chocolate birthmark on her left shoulder was what gave it away and he leapt off her, remembering again and weeping and weeping.

His sister wipes the single tear away from his face and he recalls that he is here. I’m sorry, he says. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

It was terrible for her, his sister says.