“I’m going to ask her something,” Anna said finally. “And I need you to back me up.”
“Okay.”
“I’d like to keep my renters. Extended lease through February. Which means Bea and I need somewhere to live.”
Luke’s eyebrows rose. “You want to stay at Meg’s place.”
“I want to stay at Mom’s place. Our mom. Sam.” Anna wrapped her hands around the warm mug. “Meg’s been holding onto it because she thought... Idon’t know. That she was supposed to. That keeping it empty except for her meant keeping it ready for Mom to come back someday.”
“And you don’t think Sam’s coming back.”
“I think Sam does whatever Sam wants, and the rest of us have spent too many years waiting for her to want us.” Anna heard the bitterness in her own voice and tried to soften it. “I’m not angry. Not anymore. I just think it’s time for that house to be a home again. A real home, with people living in it. Not a shrine.”
Luke nodded slowly. “And you want me to back you up when you tell Meg this.”
“I want you to be honest with her. About the fact that she’s already living here. That her life is here now—with you, not in that house. And that letting me have it isn’t abandoning Sam or the family or anything else she’s convinced herself it would mean.”
The call ended in the other room. Footsteps approached.
“Anna?” Meg appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking tired but pleased. “When did you get here?”
“Few minutes ago. Luke made tea.”
“Luke always makes tea.” Meg kissed him on the cheek as she passed, the gesture automatic, intimate, the kind of thing people did when they’d been together long enough to stop thinking about it. “What’s up?”
Anna took a breath.
“I’d like to keep my renters,” she said. “And I want tomove into Mom’s house. Officially. Me and Bea. Through the first semester, at least. Maybe longer.”
Meg went still.
“You want to?—”
“I want to live there. Make it a home. Stop pretending any of us are in temporary situations when we’re obviously not.” Anna met her sister’s eyes. “You’re living here, Meg. You have been for weeks. Your toothbrush is in his bathroom and your spreadsheets are on his table and you come back to Sam’s house like it’s an obligation instead of a home.”
“Anna—”
“Let me finish.” Anna stood, moving closer to her sister. “I know why you’ve been holding onto it. I know you think if you keep it ready, Sam might come back someday. Might want to stay. But Sam doesn’t want to stay anywhere. That’s who she is. And waiting for her to change has cost us too much already.”
Meg’s eyes were bright and she blinked to hold back the tears. She didn’t speak.
“The house should have people in it. Bea doing homework at the kitchen table. Me painting in the living room. Noise and mess and life. And of course you, too, if that’s really where you want to be.” Anna reached out, took Meg’s hand. “But we know it isn’t. And that’s okay. Let me give it that. And let yourself have this.”
She gestured at the bungalow. At Luke, watchingquietly from the table. At the life Meg had already built without admitting it to herself.
“I don’t know how to let go of it,” Meg whispered.
“You already have. You just haven’t said it out loud yet.”
They stood in Luke’s kitchen, sisters who had spent years circling each other, finally meeting in the middle. In the truth.
“Okay,” Meg said finally. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Meg squeezed her hand. “Move in. Make it yours. Make it a home.”
Anna hugged her—quick and fierce, the way their family did it.
