Page 14 of Five Summer Wishes

“Only if you scrub away all the personality with the grime.”

A pause. Then, without turning around, she said, “Dinner was nice.”

I blinked. “Did you just admit to enjoying something?”

She gave a faint, exhausted laugh. “Don’t push it.”

I grabbed a dishtowel and started drying. We worked in silence for a few minutes—awkward but companionable, the way sisters are when they’re not quite ready to apologize but aren’t angry anymore either.

“Thanks for letting Lily take the lead on dessert,” Harper said quietly. “It made her feel important.”

“Of course,” I said. “Sheisimportant.”

“She looks up to you.”

That stopped me. I swallowed. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“It is,” Harper said, finally meeting my eyes. “You’re the fun one. The one who makes her feel like the world is bigger than she thinks.”

That did something to my chest. I folded the towel too many times.

“I’m also the one who never stays anywhere long enough to leave an address,” I said.

“People still send you postcards,” Harper replied.

She rinsed the last plate and turned off the faucet.

Neither of us said anything else. We didn’t have to.

Some truths lived better in the quiet.

Back upstairs,I lit a candle on the bedside table and pulled out my sketchbook. It was half-full already—doodles, scraps of ideas, fragments of color and feeling I couldn’t say out loud.

Tonight, I let my pencil move without thinking.

A porch swing.

Three sisters sitting side by side, their shoulders touching.

A little girl in a tutu spinning in the yard.

A man with quiet eyes and strong hands holding a set of wind chimes.

The lines came easily. Too easily.

When I was a kid, Iris used to say that art wasn’t about making things pretty. It was about telling the truth with your hands when your mouth couldn’t handle the weight of it.

I hadn’t told the truth in a long time.

Not even to myself.

I looked at the page and realized I wasn’t drawing what had happened tonight.

I was drawing what I wanted to remember.

Not the clumsy sauce spill. Not the tension at the table. Not the ache behind my ribs that never quite left me.

Just this: the laughter, the light, the way it felt—briefly—to be wanted without having to perform for it.

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