The Things We Carry

The funeral reception had thinned to the stragglers—those too drunk to leave, too proud to be the first, or too weighed down by whatever unspoken thing had kept them silent in their pews. Elena sat on the back porch steps, the third glass of merlot burning a slow path through her chest, watching a stray cat stalk mice through the overgrown garden.

Her brother's old trapper hat rested on her knee, fur mashed flat from years of his sweat and careless handling. She'd found it while clearing out his apartment earlier that morning—just thrown across the back of a chair like he'd walked out of the room and never returned. Which was exactly what had happened, except he'd been halfway across the country when the aneurysm took him, and she'd been the one to pack his life into boxes, discovering only then how little she'd known.

"You're his sister, right?"

Elena turned to find a woman in a black dress that cost more than Elena's car, holding two champagne flutes. The fox—their older sister, forever framed in family lore as the one who got away, who'd taken the buyout and the corporate fast track while Leo and Elena stayed behind with the failing family business—stood looking down with something that might have been pity, might have been guilt.

"Clara," Elena said, and the name felt strange in her mouth. They hadn't spoken since the funeral, six years ago. Their mother's.

"He asked about you," Clara said, sitting without invitation, passing over a flute. "Every time we talked."

"You talked?"

"Once a month. The last Thursday." Clara sipped her champagne, eyes on the garden where the cat had caught something small and alive. "He was trying, Elena. In his way."

"His way was never showing up."

"His way was bearing the brunt of Dad's expectations so you wouldn't have to." Clara's voice was quiet, almost gentle. "You really don't know?"

The wine glass tilted in Elena's hand. She'd spent thirty-three years believing Leo had chosen freedom over duty, that she was the one left carrying the weight. That she was the one who'd sacrificed.

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying he signed over his share of the business to you three years ago. Dad made him promise not to tell until—" Clara's gaze drifted to the house, where Leo's will lay on the kitchen counter, already read. "Until he was gone."

The cat abandoned its prize and slipped into the shadows. Elena pressed her brother's hat to her chest, feeling the shape of the head it had covered, the weight of all the years they'd lost, and all the ways she'd been wrong.