The fall had been unseasonably dry thus far, so there was something particularly soothing about watching the droplets of a gentle rainshower patter against her bedroom window. Something healing, as if the water could wash away their woes and allow them the opportunity to start anew.

Amelia wished it could ever actually be that simple. If it could, Henry would have looked less melancholic when he showed up at her apartment after he got off work. Now, he was watching her watch the rain, silently grateful for the opportunity to stretch out in her bed after being on his feet for most of the day. His fingers trailed the distance from her wrist to her elbow, then back up again. The monotony of the motion was enough to start making her drowsy, but she wasn't ready to tell him to go home yet. It was a Friday night; they were in no rush.

"You know," he murmured. "I had a realization at work. In just a few more days it'll have been a month since we went on our first date."

She felt her lips break into a smile and rolled back over to face him. "Happy almost first monthiversary."

He laughed, but Amelia was having a realization too. A realization that wasn't nearly as pleasant as his.

"I really have to introduce you to my parents."

He shrugged, or at least tried to—since he was laying on his side, only one of his shoulders really moved. "It obviously has to happen eventually, yeah."

She knew that he wasn't pushing her to do it right away, that he wasn't putting her on any sort of definitive timeline before he'd be uncomfortable that she hadn't done it yet. But if not now, then when? She was practically already friends with his parents and meanwhile hers had never even laid eyes on him. It didn't feel entirely fair to him.

"We'll do it soon," she said. "Just brace yourself to be interrogated about everything you've ever done and everyone you've ever talked to."

He grinned, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth, Amelia recalled that she herself still had something she wanted to ask him about. She'd wanted to get around to it earlier in the week, but the timing had never felt right—their conversations had been happening in fatigued and hurried snippets after long days of work.

"Speaking of which...can I ask you something?"

"Always," he said, but she noticed his eyebrows inch upward in confusion or concern. "What's up?"

"I was wondering..." Please don't be a mistake. "Who's Sarah?"

It wasn't quite a deer-in-headlights reaction, but it was nearly there. Henry sat up rather abruptly as more emotions than she could even process flashed across his expression all at once. He was a puzzle and she was trying to make sense of the pieces—his jaw clenched with what might have been irritation, but it didn't match the look in his eyes, which was almost...hurt?

"What?"

"I, um–" The inside of her mouth suddenly felt extraordinarily dry. "–I overheard your mom saying something to you the other day. She said something like, 'do you think you should tell her about Sarah?'"

Henry's reaction, combined with the fact that he had a very guarded look about him right now, was plenty to convince her that the situation was definitely Not Good. He lifted a hand to massage his temple for a second, as if she'd suddenly just given him a headache. Not Good.

"Can I just—what do you think she was talking about?"

To say the least, the burst of defensiveness was concerning, but she was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he had a really, really good reason to be so prickly. Regardless, she wasn't going to fall into the trap of fighting fire with fire.

"I don't know what I think," she told him with as much calm as she could muster. "That's why I'm asking you."

He nodded once, avoiding her eye. "I...don't really know how to put this."

Amelia tried her very best to ignore the thumping of her heart in her chest, the dread. "You can just say whatever it is, Henry."

"You don't realize what you're asking me to do."

"Then I want to understand." She placed a hand on his shoulder, gingerly. "Please."

He slowly inhaled, then let it out as more of a sigh than a simple breath. "Alright," he said plainly. "Sarah was my sister."

She'd been bracing herself for just about anything but that. Sarah could have been a lover, friend, mentor, or a goddamn alien, but a sister?

"You have a sister?"

"Had a sister," he was quick to correct her. "Past tense."

If Amelia had been mildly disoriented a moment ago, now she was seeing double. Despite that, she clambered to her feet, stumbling away from the bed. "So...you're saying that you had a sister and no longer do. I don't understand."

She felt nauseous as she suddenly remembered that conversation she had with his mother after they made s'mores, how Jen had told her that she just wanted her son to be able to live a normal life without grief following him around all the time. Amelia had seen that picture in their hallway of Henry with the unfamiliar little girl whom she'd just assumed was Lily even though she didn't quite look three full years younger than him, and she'd thought he looked nervous when he saw that she noticed it—

Henry held out his hand to her, a silent request for her to return to her spot next to him on the bed. Amelia was too stunned, too utterly confused to do anything besides oblige, so she sank back down onto the mattress, wide-eyed.

He looked like he might feel a little queasy, too, but he spoke clearly, as if narrating a make-believe story that was only mildly difficult to swallow. It reminded Amelia a little bit of herself, how she'd acted the other night while trying to tell him about Colton.

"Sarah was my little sister," he explained. "She was born just over a year after I was and she...she was perfect, really. But she was diagnosed with leukemia when she was four and it got really bad really fast. Her body was barely responding to any of the treatments. So she, um, she fought it as hard as a preschooler possibly could, but there wasn't much else anyone could do for her. We lost her a few weeks after her fifth birthday."

Amelia found it difficult to absorb a single word of what he was saying while trying to do some mental math at the same time.

"So you only would have been..." she frowned. "You were six?"

He nodded. "I couldn't really process it at that age, obviously. I mean, I knew something was wrong with her. Really, really wrong. But I just...the months feel like years when you're that little, so I thought she was going to live a lot longer, I guess. Things seemed to get worse and then better and then worse and then one day that was it. She was just gone. And I was suddenly the first-grader in therapy and my parents were trying to somehow hold our family together while sinking under an ocean of funeral expenses and medical bills. It was less than a year after she died that we ended up moving into that house—the one they still live in now—to just...try to run away from it all, I guess? And we desperately needed the money they'd get by selling the bigger house. I think they already knew then that they weren't going to have any more kids."

Amelia thought her eyes felt wet, but no tears came when she blinked. Perhaps she was still in too much disbelief to cry for him just yet. "And you wouldn't...you didn't want to tell me?"

"Well, it's not exactly icebreaker material."

She gave him a look that was not quite stern but definitely serious. He softly sighed through his nose.

"Of course I felt like I should tell you. I don't want you to think I'd ever hide things from you just for the sake of hiding them. But, um–"

There it was, the catch of emotion in his voice, a tremble.

"It's just—I can barely make myself think about it these days. It's like the worst part of my life is happening all over again."

Oh.

Oh.

"Lily," Amelia exhaled, finally understanding.

"Yeah," he mumbled. "Lily. Once the worst-case scenario happens to you one time, you're not exactly optimistic that it's not going to keep happening to you. And the day she disappeared, September 2nd? That's the same day we lost Sarah, eighteen years apart. Sometimes it feels like the whole universe is conspiring against me."

Amelia was staggered. This whole time, she'd thought she had at least a decent idea of what she was dealing with, of what was going on in everyone else's minds. And now, to know that they had already lived with a fear like this before, already fought for someone for months and then lost her anyway...

"I, um," Henry was fidgeting with his fingers. "I feel really guilty for all the time I could have spent with Lily that I wasted instead. After Sarah, my parents knew that I was so lonely and were trying to get me to spend time with her, but I didn't want a replacement sister. I resented her because she got to live and Sarah didn't. It took me years—more like a decade, honestly—for me to come around and warm up to her. In high school, I was a senior the year she was a freshman and she asked me for help finding her classes on the first day because she'd been sick during orientation. After that, I felt kinda compelled to keep making sure she was okay, so we started sitting together at lunch and...yeah, we became friends. Finally."

"And you stayed in town for college," Amelia thought out loud. "Obviously."

"Obviously," he almost smiled. "And I didn't regret it because it was really nice to stay close to Lily, but sometimes it was also really hard to still be in this town where I'd been for my entire life, where I felt like I was constantly being reminded of everything I went through and how horribly I treated everyone around me because of it."

Henry leaned his head back against the headboard, holding back a sigh. "That was what made me run off to Seattle. I love my family more than anything—you know I do—but I felt like I had no identity outside of them because of all this shared trauma we have. It felt like I woke up one day and realized I didn't have any clue who I actually was beneath all of that. So it seemed like the right choice to go off and live only for myself for a couple of years. But then I get back here and two months later...this. Now, I wake up every day wondering if I traded away all the time I had left with Lily. It didn't dawn on me that she had become the thing I couldn't afford to lose until I did."

When he reached up and rubbed at his eyes, his fingers came back slick with tears. And Amelia's heart—her everything—broke for him.

"You couldn't have known," she murmured. "Henry–"

"I'm okay–"

"You're clearly not okay," she stopped him. "That's alright, you don't have to be. Come here."

He didn't protest when she pulled him into a hug, her arms holding him firmly but not tight. He didn't protest when she gently rubbed along his back with one hand. She could feel the quivering of his breathing, like he needed to cry but didn't want to. She pretended not to notice the moisture against her hair when he nuzzled his face into it; she didn't want him to think that she minded it.

"The nightmares..." she whispered.

"Yeah," he croaked, his voice thick. "I wasn't lying when I told you they aren't new. Sometimes it's Lily and sometimes it's Sarah and sometimes it's both of them and sometimes I can't even tell which one of them it is."

Amelia softly nodded that she understood—or that she was trying to understand, rather. But it all felt too cataclysmic to wrap her head around, too fundamental for her to not have known about it before now, even though the reality was that she had really only known Henry on a personal level for two months. They'd been such a life-altering two months that it felt like years had already passed until moments like this, moments like the other night when she realized she didn't know him nearly as well yet as she liked to think that she did.

"Something's bothering you," he said quietly, drawing back to look at her.

"I guess if I'm being completely honest, I'm struggling to understand why you let me sit there the other night going off about my shitty ex and you didn't bring up any of this."

"I know it probably seems unfair," Henry swallowed. "I just—it felt like the wrong moment. I didn't want to be coming up with excuses for what I did when it literally gave you a panic attack. And I know that I just sound like I'm coming up with an excuse right now, but I promise that's really how I felt in the moment."

"It's not an excuse if you're traumatized, Henry," she cracked, trying not to raise her voice. "This is—this is more than one person can keep balled up inside. I wouldn't have been so mad at you if I had just known–"

A hot, sticky tear rolled down her cheek. Henry lifted a finger to carefully brush it away, his eyes meeting hers.

"Is that what's upsetting you? I'm not angry with how you reacted," he tried to soothe her. "You know that, right?"

"I know," she sniffled. "I just feel terrible–"

"You're not terrible, Amelia."

Now it was his turn to wrap her up in his arms, to let her cry a little bit into his shirt if she needed to and delicately run his fingers through her hair. But what calmed her the most was that he was calming down, that she could hear the rhythm of his breath steadying out as he held her.

"I have a chronic problem of not wanting to burden other people with my issues, remember?" he reminded her.

A small laugh bubbled up out of her lungs. "And I have a chronic problem of thinking everything is my fault."

"We really make quite the pair, huh."

"Yeah, I think we do," she mumbled, half-joking and half-serious. "Was...was Sarah the girl in that picture in your parents' hallway?"

It took Henry a brief moment to recall what she was talking about before he nodded. "Yeah, that was before she got sick. I think I have some more pictures of her on my phone—well, pictures of pictures—if you want to see them."

She was beginning to feel the relief, the lightness, of an invisible weight lifting off her shoulders. "I'd like that."

He reached over for her nightstand, where he'd put his phone so that it wouldn't get lost in the jumble of blankets. After a moment of scrolling, he'd found what he was looking for and shifted even closer to Amelia to show her his screen.

She couldn't hold back the stupid grin that formed on her lips even if it wasn't entirely appropriate for the moment. Little Henry was adorable. He couldn't have been more than three or four years old in the picture they were looking at. His round glasses were too big for his face, making him appear slightly bug-eyed, and he was wearing a Spider-Man tee shirt. And he was fiercely side-hugging his little sister, who looked so much like him. A huge pink bow was clipped into her curly hair and she only hugged him back with one hand because the other was fiercely clinging to a purple teddy bear. It reminded Amelia of something you might find at Build-a-Bear, with a diamond pattern on its stomach, the bottom of its paws, and the inside of its ears.

"We were pretty cute, huh?"

"You were precious," Amelia agreed, tilting her chin to kiss his shoulder. "You're still precious, mind you."

As he scrolled through some more photos (of varying quality since he'd had to photograph the printed, glossy photos with his phone), Amelia realized that the purple teddy bear pretty much always made an appearance. In the living room, in the backyard, at a birthday party, even at the beach.

"She really liked that teddy bear."

"Yeah, she did. She probably liked it even more than she liked me."

Henry clicked the lock button on his phone and set it down at his side. Silently, he held out his tattooed forearm to her as if he wanted her to look at it, which confused her until he pointed to one spot with his other hand and she actually absorbed what she was looking at.

Just like that, Amelia's eyes were suddenly getting misty again. "You got the pattern tattooed?"

Like all of his other tattoos, his was in all black, but it was unmistakably the same patterned design off the teddy bear. And she had looked at it before, probably dozens of times, but she'd assumed it was sheerly decorative. She never would have known it was anything out of the ordinary without him telling her—it somehow fit in seamlessly with everything else.

"It was the first one I ever got, on my eighteenth birthday," he said softly. "I wanted something that was always going to remind me of her no matter where I went, something that no one else would ever be able to take away from me."

"I think it's beautiful," Amelia whispered back, not wanting her voice to crackle if she tried to speak up any louder.

He silently reached over to thread his fingers between her own, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. "Can I...can I admit one more thing to you?"

When she nodded, he continued. "I, um...there's obviously been about a million thoughts going through my head every moment of every day for the past few months, and a lot of them are really scary. You know that. But I think one of them that gets to me the most is the thought that we might be sitting here in five, ten, fifteen years, and we'll be talking about Lily the way you and I are talking about Sarah right now. I can't—I don't know how to live with that."

The room slipped back into a quiet stillness aside from the steady pitter-patter of the rain on the window. Amelia didn't know what to tell him.