“Well, nice to see you,” Natalie says to me. “Good of you to bring Mom back.”

I don’t know why everything she says to me always seems hostile. We used to be best friends—or at least I thought we were. Patrick—and this is one of the reasons I loved him—says that I was never, ever, ever Natalie’s best friend. At best, he says, I was her slave, sidekick, victim, and oppressed opposition. He’s seen her operate—the former award-winning beauty queen/science champion/princess/overachieving mom/cancer researcher—and he points out that even today, when we’re both adults, I regress in her presence to being a tongue-tied, unappreciated waif.

“And you’re a million times nicer and smarter and more intuitive and prettier than she is!” he said once. “Why she thinks she’s so much better is one of the great horrifying mysteries of modern life. It will be written up in textbooks, and scholars will puzzle over it in the centuries to come.”

But I know the real answer. Natalie knows she’s so much better because she has the paperwork to prove it. She’s the one who, for our whole lives together, won all the awards, captured all the good grades, got her homework done on time, kept her room clean, ran around with the popular crowd, and dated all the great guys that everyone else wanted. I was the little sister in the corner, trying to design costumes that the neighborhood cats would wear for the weddings I was intent on staging in the backyard for them.

Now even as an adult, she has everything, all the showcase toys and rewards the universe hands out to its favorites: a husband who loves her and goes off to work at a well-paying and probably boring-as-hell corporate job that he is willing to do every single day, year after year after year, just to support her and their lifestyle, and she has two adorable little daughters, a 401(k), a house with a swimming pool, and a great job researching drugs that cure diseases, and . . . well, let’s just say that no man is telling her that he doesn’t quite see himself in the same life she’s picturing. No man in her life is sitting up late at night making sculptures of a woman who died.

And if anyone happened to call Natalie’s husband a hero—I know this guy—he would swell up with pride, and he’d tell everybody in the whole world who’d listen that hell yeah, he saved somebody’s life, did everything he could, and he deserves whatever acclaim and applause and medals people might give for that. There would be medals on the mantel and hung on the walls. The situation would come up in at least 40 percent of all his conversations.

What it comes down to, it occurs to me, is that Natalie and Brian know they’re awesome, while Patrick and I . . . well, we were still feeling our way along, like two blind people in a cave, using rusty instruments to try to figure out where we were and where we were heading.

And now, looking at my glorious blonde sister scolding our father for not taking better care of himself, and then turning her dazzling but angry smile onto me, asking where Mom is hiding out—I realize that Natalie has never had to ask a single question in her life about who she is or what she wants. Everything has simply come to her, and so she doesn’t even know how the rest of us live and fret and struggle.

But then I realize something else, just as true. She’s got plenty of insecurities and fears of her own. When I look at her talking to my dad and juggling her two children, I see behind her eyes that she’s somebody who’s so tense most of the time that she could chew off her own leg. Maybe she’s got a successful marriage and a job she loves, but she doesn’t get to hang out in the Frippery like I do, talking to people about love and helping them puzzle over what to say to the people they love and yearn to connect with. She’s not seeing sparkles and running after people in restaurants because she’s seen they belong together. And she hasn’t gotten to hold Patrick’s scarred, sweet hand at night or look into that luminous, but humble face. She hasn’t seen what life looks like in the face of a person who’s been broken a time or two.

In fact, now that I think about it, everybody I know and love has been broken a time or two. They’ve all had to climb out of darkness, to push back against the overwhelming, seek out the unknown comfort in a crisis. And sometimes they do it better than other times. Sometimes, like Patrick, they’ve had to stop moving forward temporarily and go back into the darkness. And we who love them have had to just wait outside the cave for the sight of their faint little light to come bumping along through the darkness and shine straight and steady again.

I feel my eyes fill up with tears, and I wipe them away. Patrick has decided not to come through the darkness. He wants to remain in the alcove of doom.

God, I have a pang of missing Patrick so much that I get dizzy for a moment. But I miss the old Patrick, the texting Patrick who resisted love and then fell so hard in love with me that I was bowled over with the sheer force of it. Before he started taking it all back.

And I miss Fritzie.

What will happen to us? I don’t know. Maybe I have to bring myself to the point of loving Patrick enough to let him be wherever it is that he decides is home for him. It’s his choice: the alcove of doom may be what he picks for good.

And I may just stay here in Florida, the place where my DNA knows all the home ground. I have to admit that, when I let myself stop being all angsty, I love how this feels. The sun shines on my skin, my father and I sit outside every day, drinking healthy smoothies and chatting about mundane things, and the humidity frizzes up my hair even while it’s softening the dry-skin lines on my face.

A lot of people don’t know that Florida is an old Spanish word that probably means “there are lots of flowers here even in winter, so just shut up and rest.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

PATRICK

Two weeks in, and with no end in sight, Patrick thinks his life as a father resembles a game of Whac-a-Mole.

Just as he thinks he’s making some headway, that he’s got this single-dad thing down, trouble flares up in a new place.

Fritzie has broken all the rules multiple times. Everything is subject to discussion, nothing simply gets taken care of without an argument: hair, homework, friends, playdates, as well as basic human things like getting clean and getting dressed. She makes everything an ordeal, and as far as he can see, she is doing it all out of a sense of glee. For fun. He comes to the conclusion, seeing the little quirky half smile on her face when she is torturing him, that she is having the best of times.

As if the hair-cutting incident thing wasn’t bad enough, then a friend of Marnie’s named Emily Turner called to tell him a story about Fritzie letting kids rub her head for good luck—and charging them a quarter to do it. Apparently he is supposed to find this hilarious.

“She’s a bold one,” Emily Turner says, laughing. Then when he doesn’t join in, she says, “Are you doing okay? Come for a drink sometime and meet my long-suffering husband. We’ll commiserate by telling you all the vile and mercenary things our kids have done.”

Of course he will not go. He intends to soldier on without reinforcements. Except for the repairing of Fritzie’s haircut, he has resolutely not asked anyone else for help, even Ariana again, even when she pops in and out, offering assistance. It’s just that he doesn’t want to depend on anybody else. He needs to do this.