(CW: past death of a family member, grief)

The door creaked open, revealing a long-forgotten room Jack hadn’t seen in nearly thirty years.  It was coated in a thick blanket of dust and stank of mildew and sickness, and perhaps something more sinister underneath.  The blue paint that once brightened the walls was now dull and peeling; the wooden floors were splintered and rotten.  They groaned with each step he took, reawakening distant memories he’d hidden in the back of his mind for too many drawn out years.

He sighed, shoulders shuddering with trepidation and age.  Even after all this time, Jack still half-expected his little sister to be sitting in the sunken, discolored mattress in the center of the room.  He could almost see her looking up from her journal, reassuring him with her slight, gentle smile as he entered.  

“Bit of a mess, isn’t it?” Owen said, shrugging.  Jack cleared his throat and nodded, waking from his thoughts.

“Ah, yeah.  It is.  But it’s nothing that we can’t fix.”  Owen chuckled at that, placing a firm hand on Jack’s shoulder.

“Was it your room?” he asked, voice a note softer this time.  Jack wiped his eyes awkwardly.  He hadn’t told him about Isadora yet.  In fact, he’d hardly told anyone.  False sympathy wasn’t anything he wanted to hear more of; he’d heard enough of it lately every time someone brought up his parents or talked about this wretched inheritance. But condolences didn’t work like stitches.  They didn’t close the still-stinging wound in his heart.  All they did was make the other person feel good about themselves.

But Owen wasn’t most people was he?  Ever since the day they met on the coast all those years ago, he’d been Jack’s best friend; a constant lighthouse whenever the moody storms above his head tried to lead him astray. Besides, Owen had probably told him near everything about himself. He began pacing back and forth, floor squealing with uncertainty underneath him.

“It was my sister’s,” he said finally.  Owen’s eyebrows leapt up in surprise.

“You have a sister?”  Jack looked at him.

“Had.”

“Oh.”  There was a heavy pause, the air stilling around them.  Jack’s heart sank deep into his stomach, like a stone dropped in murky water.  He already regretted saying anything; he could practically sense the pity radiating from Owen’s sunken face.  He forced himself not to cringe as his friend opened his mouth to speak, anticipating some kind of generic apology or halfhearted response.

“What was she like?” he said instead.  Jack blinked.

“You really want to know?”  His voice shook during the second half of the sentence, confused and unstable.  He hadn’t said a word about his sister since her funeral.

“I do.”  Owen nodded as Jack took in a heavy breath.

“She was extraordinary,” he said, hesitantly at first, but it wasn’t long before he found his thoughts flowing from his mouth, each detail unchecked and uncensored, as if a dam had been broken.  “She loved weaving, and writing in her journal, and going to the beach.  Her favorite color was blue; it reminded her of the wild ocean waves and the open sky on a cloudless summer day.  We used to sit under that sky together, you know.  We would have picnics and run around through the tall grass.  I would put wildflowers in her hair, and she would smile, and nothing would matter.  

But then she got sick, and I couldn’t stand to be around it.  That paling face and crooked smile…they wasn’t hers anymore.  She would cough up blood and stare into space and cry about menacing monsters who weren’t ever there. Tell me, Owen, would it be terrible to admit that I was afraid of it all?”  

Owen stared at him, mouth slightly agape.

“Jack…”

“Owen, she was only seventeen.  She needed me, and I turned away.”

“And you were only nineteen, and you were scared,” Owen said earnestly.  “You can’t blame yourself.  God, I wish I had the right words for you.  Is it enough to simply know that I care?”

“It was thirty years ago,” Jack said. Owen shrugged, a bittersweet smile crossing his lips.

“Yeah,” he said, “well, some scars stick around for a while.”