She nodded.
“Okay.”
Then she asked something I had never expected.
“Can you tell me what you remember about me after the fire?”
So I did.
I told her about the nightmares.
How she used to crawl into my bed and hold my wrist because she was terrified I would disappear while she slept.
How she carried Buttons everywhere for another year before suddenly refusing to look at it.
How, before middle school made everything complicated, she once punched a boy in the arm for staring at the scar near my neck.
Chloe laughed once through her tears.
“I did that?”
“You got detention.”
“That sounds like me.”
“It used to.”
Her smile vanished.
That sentence stayed between us.
The weeks afterward were uncomfortable.
There was no miraculous return to being inseparable twins.
Chloe apologized privately the next morning, then again three days later when she realized her first apology had been mostly about how terrible she felt.
The second one was different.
She named what she had done.
The robe.
The microphone.
The chanting.
The phones.
The years of comments.
She didn’t ask me to forgive her.
That mattered.
Our parents apologized too.
They finally admitted that protecting one daughter from guilt had meant asking the other daughter to carry the truth alone.
Their intention had been love.
The result had still caused damage.
We began speaking about the fire without lowering our voices.
My mother found Buttons in a storage box in the attic.
One eye was still a brown plastic button.
She placed the rabbit on the kitchen table one evening without saying anything.
Chloe stared at it for nearly a minute.
Then she picked it up and cried against my shoulder.
I let her.
Months later, Chloe asked whether I regretted going back into the house.
We were sitting beside the same pool, this time alone.
I had on a sleeveless shirt.
It was the first one I had bought in years.
“No,” I told her.
She looked down.
“Even after everything I did to you?”
“I was six.
You were my sister.
You still are.
What happened later doesn’t change why I ran back.”
She wiped her eyes.
“But it changes us.”
“Yes.”
She nodded.
We didn’t pretend otherwise.
That birthday did change us.
