“I’M SORRY,” KIRA WHISPERED as her class poured into the gym for third-period PE. She’d clearly been working on this apology for the entirety of her first two classes, because the rest of it came out in a rush. “I should have talked to you first. But selling Mama’s belongings was the only way I could think of to pay the water and electric bills. And it wasn’t as if we were using any of that stuff.”
“It’s okay,” I told my sister, even though it really wasn’t. But I was disappointed in myself more than in Kira. Disappointed that my thirteen-years-younger sister had taken household expenses upon herself without me noticing...and, I’ll admit it, disappointed that I’d never see our dead mother’s possessions again. Just because Dad—and then I—had hidden the items away in a dusty box while avoid
