“Sarah, I didn’t know you weren’t invited.”
That one did not surprise me.
part 2 My own mother said my PhD graduation wasn’t worth the flight,
But it still hurt.
A silence stretched between us.
Then he said, “Come.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No, Derek.”
“Not for them. For me.”
I stared at him.
He swallowed. “I want my sister at my graduation dinner.”
The word sister moved through me with unexpected force.
For a long time, I had not felt like his sister. I had felt like a footnote in his biography. The smart one. The difficult one. The one who missed holidays because she was “still in school.” The one whose work nobody understood, so nobody asked about it.
“You should have asked before today,” I said.
“I know.”
“You should have noticed.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not sure one hallway apology fixes that.”
“I know that too.”
He sounded so unlike himself that I looked at him more closely.
