More frequently now than a month ago.

But if today was a good day, Ivy didn’t have to know that. If there was one thing experience had taught me, it was that she wouldn’t stick around to find out.

“I know, Gramps,” I said, taking a seat at the rickety wooden table that had been falling apart in my grandfather’s kitchen for longer than I’d been alive. “I can’t believe we actually merited an in-person Ivy checkup.”

My sister’s dark brown eyes locked on to mine.

“Ivy? Who’s Ivy?” My grandfather gave Ivy a conspiratorial grin before turning back to me. “You got an imaginary friend there, Bear?”

My heart skipped a beat. I could do this. I had to do this. For Gramps.

“I don’t know,” I replied, my fingers digging into the underside of my chair. “Is ‘imaginary friend’ what they’re calling perpetually absent siblings these days?”

“You’re the one who stopped returning my calls,” Ivy cut in.

Good. Let her focus on me. Let her get mad at me. Anything to keep her from realizing that whatever she’d managed to glean from talking to my guidance counselor and the ranch hands—it wasn’t even the half of it. Nobody knew how bad things were.

Nobody but me.

“I didn’t return your calls because I didn’t feel like talking,” I told Ivy through gritted teeth. “You can’t just check out of our lives and then expect me to drop everything when you finally decide to pick up a phone.”

“That’s not what happened, Tessie, and you know it.”

Getting a rise out of Ivy felt better than it should have. “It’s Tess.”

“Actually,” she snapped back, “it’s Theresa.”

“For goodness’ sakes, Nora,” my grandfather cut in. “She’s only here for two weeks each summer. Don’t get your panties in a twist over a few missed calls.”

Ivy’s face went from frustrated to gutted in two seconds flat. Nora was our mother’s name. I barely remembered her, but Ivy was twenty-one when our parents died. The age difference between the two of us always felt massive, but the fact that Ivy had spent seventeen more years with Mom and Dad—that was truly the great divide. To me, the ranch was home, and our grandfather was the only real parent I’d ever known. To Ivy, he was just the grandpa she’d spent two weeks with every summer growing up.

It occurred to me, then, that when she was little, he might have called her Bear, too.

He thinks I’m Ivy, and he thinks Ivy is Mom. There was no covering for this, no barbed comment I could toss out that would make Ivy brush it off. For the longest time, she just sat there, staring at Gramps. Then she blinked, and when her eyes opened again, it was like none of it had ever happened, like she was a robot who’d just rebooted to avoid running a program called “excess emotion.”

“Harry,” she said, addressing our grandfather by his first name. “I’m Ivy. Your granddaughter. This is Tess.”

“I know who she is,” he grunted. I tried not to see the uncertainty in his eyes.

“You do,” Ivy replied, her voice soothing but no-nonsense. “And you also know that she can’t stay here. You can’t stay here.”

“Like hell we can’t!” I bolted to my feet.

My grandfather slammed his palm into the table. “Language, Theresa!”

Just like that, I was me again, if only for the moment.

“Give us a minute, Tess,” Ivy ordered.

“Go on, Bear.” My grandfather looked old suddenly—and very, very tired. In that instant, I would have done anything he asked. I would have done anything to have him back.

I left them alone in the kitchen. In the living room, I paced as the minutes ticked by. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Around the furniture, in little figure eights, from one side of the room to the other.

“You used to do that when you were little.” Ivy appeared in the doorway, hovering there for a moment before taking a seat on the couch. “You’d do loops around Mom’s feet, the coffee table. Other babies learned to walk. You learned to pace.” She smiled slightly. “It drove her nuts.”

Ivy and I had only lived in the same house for that one year, when I was a baby and she was a senior in high school. I wished sometimes that I could remember it, but even if I could, she’d still be a stranger—one who threatened everything I’d worked so hard to protect.

“You should have called me when things got bad, Tess.”

Called her? I should have picked up a phone and called her, when she couldn’t even be bothered to visit?

“I’m handling it, Ivy.” I cursed myself, cursed the guidance counselor for making the call. “We’re fine.”

“No, sweetie, you’re not.”

She didn’t get to come here, after years, and tell me I wasn’t fine. She didn’t get to insert herself into our lives, and she didn’t get to call me sweetie.

“There’s a treatment center in Boston,” she continued calmly. “The best in the country. There’s a waiting list for the inpatient facility, but I made some calls.”

My stomach twisted sharply. Gramps loved this ranch. He was this ranch. It wouldn’t survive without him. I’d given up everything—track, friends, the hope of ever getting a good night’s sleep—to keep him here, to keep things running, to take care of him, the way he’d always taken care of me.

“Gramps is fine.” I set my jaw in a mutinous line. “He gets confused sometimes, but he’s fine.”

“He needs a doctor, Tessie.”

“So take him to a doctor.” I swallowed hard, feeling like I’d already lost. “Figure out what we need to do, what I need to do, and then bring him home.”

“You can’t stay here, Tess.” Ivy reached for my hand. I jerked it back. “You’ve been taking care of him,” she continued softly. “Who’s been taking care of you?”

“I can take care of myself.”

The set of her jaw matched my own. “You shouldn’t have to.”

“She’s right, Bear.” I looked up to see Gramps standing in the doorway. “Don’t you worry about me, girlie,” he ordered. He was lucid—and intractable.

“You don’t have to do this, Gramps,” I told him. My words fell on deaf ears.