“Sorry. Spaced out for a second.” I force myself to focus, to be present. Three days. I have three days before I disappear into the House of Gold, and I don’t know when I’ll see her again. I need to be here. Now. Fully. “Tell me again?”
She does, and this time I listen for real. Give her the older sister advice she’s looking for; just be yourself, if he likes you he likes you, don’t overthink it. The normal stuff. The stuff that feels like playing a role I’ve perfected over the years.
Because I can’t tell her the truth. Can’t say: I’m leaving in three days to serve an angel of Greed, and I don’t know if I’ll survive it, and if something happens to me you need to run far and fast because they’ll come for you next.
I can’t tell her any of that.
So instead I smile and nod and pretend that my biggest concern is whether her study date is actually a date.
“You’re the best,” Luna says, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “I’m so glad you came. I know you’re busy with work and everything, but it means a lot that you made time.”
Her hand is warm in mine. Solid. Real.
I squeeze back, trying to memorize the feeling. “Always have time for you, kid.”
“I’m not a kid anymore.” But she’s grinning.
“You’ll always be a kid to me. I changed your diapers. I get to call you kid forever.”
She laughs, pulls her hand back to return to her coffee. “Fair enough.”
We sit there for a while, talking about nothing important. Her classes. Her roommate. The club she joined, something environmental, working to reduce campus waste. She tells me about the protest she’s organizing, about the petition she started, about her plans to make the campus carbon neutral by 2030.
She wants to save the world, and I want to let her try.
The conversation flows easily, the way it always does with her. She’s the only person I can be around for over twenty minutes without feeling exhausted. The only person whose presence doesn’t feel like work.
Maybe it’s because I raised her. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t know what I really am, so she expects nothing except the version of me I show her, the responsible older sister who has her shit together, who works a boring consulting job, who’s there when she needs her.
Maybe it’s just because I love her, and love makes everything easier.
“Oh!” Luna sits up suddenly, pulling her phone out. “I almost forgot. Look at this dog I saw yesterday.”
She shows me a picture, some kind of golden retriever mix with a goofy expression, and I dutifully admire it while she tells me about how it was on campus with its owner and she got to pet it for like ten minutes.
“You should get a dog,” she says.
“I can barely take care of myself.”
“That’s not true. You take care of everyone.” She says it casually, but there’s weight behind it. Truth she doesn’t evenrealize she’s speaking. “You took care of me my whole life. And you took care of Mom before she died.”
I didn’t know she was preparing me. Training me. Getting ready to pass me a debt I never agreed to carry.
“You okay?” Luna asks, and I realize I’ve gone quiet.
“Yeah. Just thinking about Gramms.”
Luna’s expression softens. “I miss her sometimes. I know she was kind of cold, but she was always nice to me.”
Because you’re not a sin eater. Because you don’t have angel blood. Because she didn’t need to train you for this life.
“She loved you.”
“She loved you too. I know she had a weird way of showing it, but she did.”
I’m not so sure about that. Gramms’ love, if that’s what it was, came with conditions. With expectations. With the understanding that was useful to her, both as a sin eater and, I guess, as an heir to pass her debts to when she was gone.
But Luna can’t know that. Hell, I didn’t work regularly for years and years while she grew up just to ensure she didn’t touch this part of the world. Took endless stupid jobs to make ends meet. Between those and the small inheritance left from our mother, and Gramms’ help, we made it work.
