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I know that voice. I have been rescued by that voice my entire life, right up until the part where I'm the one left paying for it. And today, of all the days there have ever been, I do not have it in me to hear about my sister's brand-new idea that's going to fix everything.

But I'll answer. I always answer.

Which is, when you get right down to it, the whole entire problem.

I don't call Birdie back. I don't have to. Forty minutes later, there's a knock, and then a key in my lock, because of course Birdie has a key. Birdie has had a key to every door I've ever had, and she lets herself in wearing a caftan and a cloud of patchouli and the biggest smile I've seen since Friday split my life down the middle.

"Ag!" She's already going. "Okay, don't say no until you've heard the whole thing, because this is the one, I can feel it in my body."

And she launches. It's candles, but it's also a lifestyle, it's called Manifest, and there's a girl who does labels and a pop-up she can get into and it's basically free money once it gets going, and she only needs a little to start, two grand, three at the most, and she already knows what I'm going to say but this time is different, Ag, this time she can feel it.

I stand in my kitchen in the clothes I slept in, twelve hours out from three men telling me they'd known the whole time, and I listen to my little sister ask me for three thousand dollars I do not have so she can sell candles that are also a lifestyle.

And I open my mouth to do what I have always done. Manage it. Talk her down soft. We'll see, not this month, let me think about it, the gentle no I've been handing her since we were kids.

"Oh," she says, "and Kayla says she's so sorry about the whole Diablo thing getting around, she feels just awful, but honestly, Ag, it totally blew over. Nobody even cares."

Nobody even cares.

And something that has been bolted down inside me tears loose.

"It didn't blow over, Birdie." My voice comes out very quiet, which scares even me. "It cost me everything I have."

She blinks. "What do you⁠—"

"Do you know why I was on that website? Do you actually know?" I can't stop it now. It's coming up and out of me and there is no shoving it back down. "Because I cosigned a loan for a goat yoga ranch. A goat yoga ranch, Birdie. And when it went under, the way every single thing you touch goes under, it wasn't your name on the paperwork. It was mine. It is always mine. So I took my clothes off for strangers, every night for weeks, to dig you out of a hole you dug, and the one thing I asked, the one thing, was that you keep your mouth shut about it. And you told Kayla. You told a woman who announced her yeast infection to a room full of strangers. And it got around, and my⁠—"

I stop before I say the rest of it. She doesn’t need to know about the guys. She doesn't get those.

"Whatever. So don't you stand in my kitchen and tell me nobody cares. I care. I'm the only one who ever has to."

Her smile is gone now. Long gone. But I'm not done, because twenty-eight years of swallowed things are coming up all at once and there is no bolting them back down.

"I have been your mother since I was nine years old. I packed your lunches. I did your homework. I lied to your teachers and I covered for you with every boyfriend Mom ever dragged home. I have spent my entire life being the one who fixes it, whatever it is, whoever broke it, and I never once got to be the one who needs catching, because if I stopped holding us both up, who was going to? Nobody ever caught me, Birdie. Not one single time."

"Ag." It comes out of her tiny. "I didn't, I didn't know it got that bad. Why wouldn't you just tell me⁠—"

"Because you're not a person a body can tell things to!" It rips out of me. "You're a person things happen to. You drift through your whole beautiful life leaving fires behind you and calling them adventures, and I come along after with the water bucket every time, and I am so tired. I am so tired of being the only grown-up in this family. There's nothing left in me. There is nothing left to give you. Go find somebody else to save you, because I am done. I am done."

And then the worst thing is the quiet.

Birdie doesn't yell back. She’s never once yelled at me in her life. That was never how we worked. She just stands there in her caftan with her eyes gone glassy and her hopeful, stupid, beautiful face, and she nods. Small. As if I've confirmed something she's been afraid of for a long time.

"Okay," she says. Barely a sound. "Okay, Ag."

She picks up her bag. She lets herself out the way she let herself in, only softer, and the door clicks, and I am alone in my kitchen.

I got the last word. Twenty-eight years, and I finally said the whole thing, front to back, and I won.

I have never felt worse in my life.

I slide down the cabinet to the kitchen floor and for the first time since that windowless room, I cry. Really cry. The kind with no bottom to it.

Because I was right. That's the unbearable part. Every word out of my mouth was true.

And being right, it turns out, is the last thing I wanted.

I cry until there's nothing left in me to cry with, which takes a while, and then I stay on the kitchen floor and just feel sorry for myself.