So I smiled again, softer this time. “Okay. Funny. You got me.”
She didn’t laugh.
The air in my room turned heavy, like the moment right before a storm breaks. My smile slid off my face. I sat up slowly, pulling the blanket to my waist like it could protect me from whatever was coming next.
“Miranda,” I said, using the voice I used when she was little and about to tell me she’d broken something valuable. “Talk to me.”
She swallowed. I watched her throat move. Her gaze flicked toward the hallway, and I suddenly noticed how dressed she was—jeans, boots, hair brushed, shoulders squared like armor.
“You always said,” she began, and her voice cracked just slightly, “that when I turned eighteen, I’d get to choose my life.”
My heart gave a strange, painful twist. “Yes,” I said carefully. “I said you’d get to choose your future.”
Her lips pressed into a hard line. “No. You said I’d get to choose.”
Silence stretched between us. In the quiet, I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen, the faraway sound of someone’s lawnmower outside, a dog barking down the street like life was still normal for everyone else.
“Miranda,” I whispered, “what’s going on?”
She stepped forward at last, two slow steps, and then stopped again. It was like she was trying to cross an invisible line and couldn’t.
“There’s… someone here,” she said.
I frowned. “Someone? Who?”
