I nodded in greeting, folding my hands over each other in my lap.

Naomi took a second, probably evaluating my posture, and she leaned back in her seat. “What’s going on?”

I knew what she was referring to, but I still played dumb. I didn’t know why. I could’ve gotten a gold star in stall tactics too. “What do you mean?”

She smiled briefly, nodding at me. “You know.”

There was our relationship, right there. She knew I knew. I knew she knew that I knew, and yet I still played the game. And she just called me on it.

I never wanted these sessions, but I’d dropped my wall slowly over the last ten months, even going after I didn’t have to. But today was the day. It would be the day I clued everyone in on what was going on with me, because until then, it’d been another stall tactic of mine.

“Okay.” She let out a sigh, leaning back in her seat. “For real, what is going on with you?”

I never wanted to talk about Willow.

She’d been the reason my parents wanted me to come to these things—because I’d walked in and found her body first. I hadn’t known she was feeling like that. There’d been warning signs, but I didn’t know how to read them. I knew that, but it wasn’t the same for everyone. I knew that too.

I coughed, clearing my throat. “She had mood swings.”

Naomi leaned forward.

“That’s one of the warnings signs, right?” I looked away.

“Yes.” I saw her nodding from the corner of my eye. “You looked up the signs, or are you guessing?”

I didn’t have to guess. “She would go on these tangents, just raging about everything. I thought it was because we were moving.”

“Yeah. I can see why you’d be confused.”

But I wasn’t done. “She withdrew from everyone too.”

“Yeah. You mentioned that one time.”

“She and Duke broke up, but I thought that was because of the move too. Later, Serena told me she’d stopped talking to her too.”

“Serena was Willow’s . . .”

“Best friend,” I supplied. “I didn’t know about that, but Serena told me when they came here a few months ago.”

“Right. You mentioned their visit.”

I wanted to laugh at that, but no sound came to me. I’d never told Naomi about the night with Stephanie Witts—not to keep it away from her, but because it wasn’t something I needed to process. Stephanie Witts never hurt me. She actually helped, and I didn’t want to give her any more time in my mind.

“She was sleeping a lot too, and then some nights . . .” Some nights she would be working out. Some days she slept two hours, and some days she slept twelve hours.

“Some nights?”

I shook my head. “I thought she had an eating disorder. I didn’t know she was suicidal. She never . . .” My throat was burning again. “Feeling hopeless, thinking about wanting to die, feeling trapped, feeling like being a burden, unbearable pain . . .”

I kept listing the symptoms. The checklist had been engraved in my memory since June thirtieth, last summer.

“I just thought she had an eating disorder, and I didn’t take it seriously. I thought they would help her. I just thought . . .”

How do you do this? How do you talk about how it was missed in one person, but it shouldn’t have been for another?

Naomi sat forward, leaning down so her arms were resting on her legs. “Mackenzie, I’m confused.” Her voice was quiet. It was always quiet. She paused as if she was unsure of what to say, but I knew that couldn’t be true. Counselors knew what to say. They understood things the rest of us didn’t. They understood us even when we didn’t understand ourselves.

Right?

Then Naomi spoke again, her voice still soft and delicate, as if she were trying to trick me into opening up to her. “I haven’t pushed about your sister’s suicide note, but I know you read it. Your parents told me. It was right next to her when she, when you . . .” Another awkward cough. “When you found her. Your mother told me it was in your hands, but you won’t talk about it and acknowledge it. I think . . .”

Yes, Naomi. Tell me what you think. Tell me how I’m supposed to process and grieve, and more importantly, tell me how I’m supposed to tell the truth about the worst day of my life. Tell me, please.

I raged at her in my head, but not one of those words passed my lips. I was a statue, my head turned away, my usual stony expression firmly in place.

Yes, there were cracks. Yes, some of the cuts had healed. Yes, I had a new layer on the outside. My life had changed. It wasn’t exactly better. There was no world where I would say it was better without my sister, but it was different.