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My sister’s dark eyes narrow at me, thoughtful. She places her hands, still sticky from the baklava, on each of my knees. “I can do that.”

“Do what?” I ask.

“Be your tether.”

* * *

Hannah stays through the weekend. She gets me out of the apartment, and we do cheesy tourist shit. A bus tour. Times Square. A boat to Ellis Island.

At some point, on Sunday afternoon, she disappears for a few hours, returning with takeout from my favorite Indian restaurant. I don’t ask if she saw Henry, and she doesn’t offer it up, but I know. And I also understand that it’s not about me. They formed their own bond. It was selfish to assume I was the only one Hannah was checking up on.

But halfway through my aloo gobi, when Henry’s image hasn’t left my mind, I ask softly, “How is he?” I don’t look at my sister, instead taking interest in the large piece of cauliflower on my fork.

Hannah taps my foot with hers, causing me to glance up. “Would you want me to tell him how you are?”

I shake my head. “No, probably not.”

I should drop it. I know that. But the confirmation that she was with him, only hours earlier, turns me desperate for any sliver of information.

“I just need to know that he’s okay. Or that he’s going to be,” I add.

Hannah points accusatorily at me with the chicken on her fork. “See for yourself. Stop being such a coward.”

I don’t know how. My sister knows it too.

We eat in silence for a while, until Hannah puts down her fork and turns to me. “There is one more thing. Since you won’t answer anyone’s calls. I don’t want you to spin out any further, but the house is in escrow. They close in two weeks. Mom asked if there’s any way you could come home again, even just for a day or two, to clear out your room. You don’t have to fly back with me tomorrow, but you could.”

I consider it for a moment, the idea of getting out of the city immediately comforting. “Let me email my boss.”

* * *

After getting permission to work remotely, I book a ticket back on Hannah’s flight. I try not to ask any more Henry-related questions, even though I have many tumbling around in my head. Did Kristine’s house sell too? Will he be back home when we’re there? Did he ask about me?

Are you sure he doesn’t hate me?

Is it possible he still loves me?

When Hannah and I arrive at our childhood home for the last time, Mom greets us with open arms. Hannah dips out quickly, leaving me with Mom, and I immediately burst into tears.

“Oh, honey” is all she says. No I told you so. No I warned you not to do this. She sits us down on the couch, petting my hair for what feels like hours, her fingers winding through my disastrous curls.

“I’m so sorry,” I tell her at some point, but she just shushes me gently.

I spend the next week at home, waking up early to work on East Coast time, then helping Mom pack up the house. She forces food on me at every opportunity, and I eat more bagels than I ever have in my adult life. Even if New York bagels are scientifically better, there’s just something about the ones from the shop I grew up going to that’s impossible to beat. Hannah pops back every other day, in between her shifts.

We don’t do anything as a soon-to-be family. I see Kristine once, in passing, and she gives me a warm, sad hug. A few days into my stay, I notice Henry is here too. He pulls up in the CR-V with takeout from Pepe’s. I watch him carry the bag up the porch and let himself into the house next door, and I feel like I can barely breathe. I wonder how long he’s been here. If he’s spent any time looking at me out the window. And then I immediately realize how unfair it is for me to even think that.

I see Trevor come and go a few times throughout the week, the bed of his truck filled at various points with boxes, trash bags, and random pieces of old furniture. Even though the thought of it makes my heart hurt, I’m glad Trevor is there for Henry through all of this.

We pack up Mom’s Camry three times with clothing donations. I fill some boxes to ship back to New York. Yearbooks, my Meg Cabot collection, rom-com DVDs that I have no way to play but feel like I can’t give up. The Grease VHS, its paper cover tattered and worn like my heart.

On my last day home, the last day I’ll ever spend in this house, I move to the final section in the back of my closet. The one remaining spot to go through before I’ve cleared out this room that will never be mine again.

It’s there that I uncover the sealed memory box I used to keep. A thick, shiny cardboard box I’d taken once when someone sent a Harry & David gift basket to my parents. Movie ticket stubs that dated back to age ten. A letter from my dad the night before I started high school. Old games of MASH and Soulmate, scribbled onto torn notebook paper and napkins. Scorecards from bowling nights where I very nearly always won. Notes passed between me and Frankie in a Spanish class that are almost entirely in code, so much so that I can barely follow it or remember the context. But I would recognize her swirly cursive anywhere, the easy way we’ve always been able to talk to each other. I snap a photo and text it to her.

I dig deeper into the box, finding a scrap of paper with Henry’s unmistakable handwriting—block letters like an architect—ripped from the corner of a math worksheet.

You realize I’m joking when no one else does.