Freya found me in the garden on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on the same bench our mother used to favor, according to our father, though neither of us had ever known her well enough to verify it ourselves, the wood weathered soft and grey under years of sun neither of us remembered.
"Can I ask you something," she said, sitting down beside me without waiting for an answer, which had become, over the past weeks, simply how we talked to each other now, unguarded, uninvited, entirely comfortable in a way I still marveled at some mornings, still half expecting it to disappear if I looked at it too directly.
"Always."
"How did you know," she said, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve, uncharacteristically hesitant, her usual careful composure slipping in a way I'd rarely seen from her, "tha
