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erase what I’d just said. “I mean, it looks like it could have been a lot worse.”
    I stayed where I was, wishing he’d say something. Wishing he’d tell me it was okay, just as he had when we were children. But he kept his back to me as if I weren’t even there. In another place and time, I might have been hurt by it.
    I tried again. “Who do you think those bones belong to? It’s a little creepy knowing they’ve been here all along. Remember the time we found that bone by the Indian mound and how scared we were until Bootsie told us it was a chicken bone?”
    He continued to study one of the larger bags and didn’t turn around when he finally spoke. “You got a death wish or something?”
    My mouth dried, the only sign my body allowed to tell me that his words had skirted a little closer to the truth than I liked.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    He wrote something on a piece of masking tape and stuck it on the bag before dropping it into a box. “An old dog’s got enough sense to get out of the rain. Did it occur to you to seek shelter last night or didn’t you notice the weather?”
    I swallowed. “I wanted to get home. I didn’t really think about anything else.” I almost winced at how stupid I sounded.
    Continuing to ignore me, he said, “A tornado touched down in Moorhead and another near Yazoo City, and the sirens were blowing all night. There’s no cure for stupid, Vivi.”
    This was the brother I recognized, and I found my breath slowing with relief. “It’s good to see you, too.”
    He wrote something else on a piece of masking tape before affixing it to another bag and then dropping it into the same box as the previous bag.
    â€œWho’s Chloe?”
    He’d taken me off guard. “How do you know about Chloe?”
    â€œI saw it written on the back of that picture on your nightstand. And I saw the sonogram, too.”
    It was warm in the old building, but an icy chill filled me from the inside, making me wonder if my pain and regret were no match for mere chemicals. “You had no right to snoop like that.”
    Keeping his head bent under the large domed light, he said, “I went up to talk with you, but you were sleeping. I saw the photos, so I looked. We hadn’t heard from you in nine years; I figured I’d take the chance of finding out what you’ve been up to while I could.”
    â€œYou had no right.”
    He shrugged. “We’re family, Vivi. You might have forgotten it, but I haven’t.”
    I remembered what Tripp had said—about how I’d left Tommy behind, too—and I softened. Even as children, Tommy had been the even-keeled one, always the cool head in tense situations. I’d always reasoned it a good thing, considering my own volatile nature, until he’d been the first person to run down the front porch steps to throw his arms around the mother I barely recognized.
    I sat down on a hard wooden bench, one I remembered from the downtown shop. “Chloe was my stepdaughter,” I said quietly, my mental haze allowing me to take the sting from saying Chloe’s name. And to stare at the back of Tommy’s T-shirt with a beer logo emblazoned across his shoulder blades, absently noticing that his hair needed cutting.
    His hands paused but he still didn’t turn around. “Was?”
    â€œHer father, Mark, and I are divorced. Keeping Chloe in my life wasn’t an option.” I tucked the memory of her sad, angry face as I’d left under the fuzzy pillow of my pills, where I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. “Mark and I were married for seven years—since Chloe was five. Her mother moved to Australia and had another baby with her new husband and kind of forgot about Chloe. I was pretty much all she had.” I swallowed. “When Mark divorced me, I didn’t even get visitation. I had to leave her