The black dress still carried the faint scent of lilies and damp rain when I turned into my sister’s driveway on a cool afternoon in late September in Brookfield Ridge, Wisconsin, the kind of day where everything feels still, like the world is quietly waiting for something to happen.
I had come straight from work in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, still dressed in my blazer with my laptop bag resting in the back seat, and I kept telling myself this visit would be simple because it was just one day before Aubrey Dawson’s wedding, one final moment as sisters before her life changed, and despite everything I was still hopeful even after years of distance that neither of us ever fully explained.
I walked inside without knocking the way I used to when we were younger, back when we only had each other after losing our parents in a brutal winter accident on an icy highway outside Eau Claire, and in those years Aubrey had been my entire world while I believed I was hers too.