Figure out what you love, he had said. Do it with everything you have.

She was still trying to figure out what she loved. She was seven and had not had a great many opportunities.

Her mother had died when Lily was two - a cardiac event, quick and final, the kind of thing that happened to thirty-year-old women in a statistical distribution that didn't help anyone feel better about it. Lily had no real memories of her mother, just an absence shaped like one: the way a room feels when something has been moved and the furniture hasn't adjusted yet. Her father had kept a photograph on his desk. That was how she knew her own eyes - you have your mother's eyes, he'd said, once, softly, and then looked away as though he'd said something he hadn't meant to.

She had been carrying these eyes around now for seven years, and soon she would have to go back inside the house and carry them through a living room full of people who were sorry about her father in the general, comfortable way people were sorry about tragedies that happened to other families.

"Lily."

Ethan. She knew him by his voice and by his footsteps before she even looked up - she had been cataloguing her brother's sounds since she was old enough to be frightened and to understand that the specific rhythm of his walk meant things were okay. He was fourteen years old and had been the most important person in her life for as long as she had been conscious, not because he was dramatic about it but because he was simply, consistently, present.

He came around the hedge and sat down beside her without asking, cross-legged in his funeral suit. The suit was ill-fitting - borrowed from a neighbor's husband, too short in the sleeves - and Ethan wore it with the complete indifference of a person who had other things to think about.

They sat together for a while without speaking. The kitchen window in the house was bright - someone had turned on all the lights, guests moving through it like fish in a tank.

"Are we going to be okay?" Lily asked.

"Yes," Ethan said.

"You always say yes."

"I'm always right."

She leaned her head against his shoulder. His arm came around her, automatic. This was what he did - put himself between the problem and her, without fuss, without asking for credit. He had been doing it since he was twelve years old and she was five and their father was sick and their mother was long gone and the only choice in front of them was this: lean on each other or fall. He had chosen to lean on her rather than let her fall. She had spent two years trying to carry enough of herself that he wouldn't have to.

She wasn't very good at it yet.

"Calvin's been looking at me again," she said. She felt Ethan go still. "At the service. You know how he looks. With the-"

"I know."

"Sandra hit me last Tuesday," Lily said. She'd been waiting to say this. She'd been saving it, unsure when the right moment would be, and then her father died and she thought: if there's a right moment, this is probably it. "With the back of her hand. On my arm. Because I knocked over a glass."

Ethan pulled back to look at her. His face did the thing it did when he was managing something large and internal - the slight tightening at the corners of his eyes, the deliberate steadiness of his breath. He looked at her arm.

"How bad?"

"It's gone now. It was purple for a few days."

He exhaled through his nose. His jaw worked. For a moment she thought he was going to stand up and go back inside and say something that would make things dramatically worse, and she tensed in anticipation of having to stop him.

He didn't stand up.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"I'm not going to do anything stupid in the next ten minutes," he said. "I'm going to think."

His voice was very controlled. She knew what that control cost him. Ethan had been carrying their father's illness and their uncle's volatility and the entire weight of her safety for two years, and he had never once, that she could remember, lost control where she could see it. He was fourteen years old in a borrowed suit, had already taken any job he was old enough to be given, and the only time she'd ever seen him crack - once, once - was the night their father's doctor called and said this is the phase where we focus on comfort. Ethan had sat in the car in the hospital parking lot for forty-five minutes and Lily had sat beside him and they didn't speak. Then he'd gotten out of the car, straightened his jacket, and walked back in.