Sunlight bled through the white curtains, only halfway tugged open, onto the surface of the bed when I surfaced from sleep. Frost decorated the surface of the window and a faint chill lingered in the small room. I drew in a slow breath, easing myself from sleep, and opened my eyes to find a white rectangular, brown-rimmed ceiling above me. This was not the ceiling of my own bedroom. I stared sleepily up at the sight above with tired eyes, slowly trying to piece together where I was, and then the reminder struck me once again.

It wasn't my house at all. It was Lottie's and Lyle's. Last night, I had spent dinnertime here and a couple hours following before the invitation was extended for me to stay the night. When I had awakened yesterday morning, I hadn't any clue that this was where I would have ended up the very next day. The reason I was here in the first place was because I ran away from home after hearing what had happened, escaping first back to the emptied building of Happy Home for the day and then back with Lottie to her own house.

After hearing what had happened.

Memories from yesterday proceeded to gradually trickle in again, a flickering image like the recollections of a dream as I rested my head on the pillow beneath it. Just minutes after four in the afternoon, Lyle received a call from my mother during Happy Homeroom and retold the message of me returning home as promptly as possible. Not only had I been forced to leave, but so had Lottie, Lyle himself, and the hundreds of animals who had been unlucky enough to visit or have appointments at that time. I arrived at home again to find out that my own twin sister had lost her life at work, turning right around and heading back to the HHDA to try and contact her. That was when Lottie had found me, right as I was desperately reaching out to her over the phone. We spent the afternoon in each other's company, returned to her own home for dinner, witnessed some sensitive information being spilled that I had never once suspected about Lyle, and went to bed.

I pushed out a sigh, rolling over onto my side and nuzzling deeper into the mattress as I wrapped the gray blanket snugly around me. With the barrier between now and the surreal events that had once been my now, I struggled to accept that the entire string of them hadn't been a busy dream. Just a hasty plotline that my subconscious had hurled me through while I slept last night. But then why would I have been here this morning?

A metallic-like squeak arrived from somewhere down the hall, shortly followed by the trickling of water from the running shower. The day was already opening up as everyone else prepared for it. With that, it was time for me to be up and about as well. I heaved myself up to a seat in the bed as the blankets drooped around me, dragging a paw through my bedhead hair to push it back from my face, and snuck a glance at the alarm clock perched upon the nightstand for my convenience.

8 : 0 7

Wait a minute. I reached out and snagged ahold of the clock with one paw, staring at the numbers so intently that my gaze nearly burned through them. Why was it so late? I was meant to be at work seven minutes ago, not to mention how much earlier Lyle would have needed to be there. Given that nobody had stopped by to wake me up and at least someone was still here, with the rain-like dripping of the shower, clearly there was a good reason why we were still all hanging around here.

Rubbing the drowsiness from my eyes, I shuffled my way out into the quiet halls from my temporary-bedroom door. Aside from the running shower from the bathroom, I registered a different sound from down the other way. It was the patient pouring of a cup of coffee from the main entrance area, likely from the kitchen. As I emerged sluggishly into the joint entry room, I noticed Lyle standing at the counter just in time to watch him lift a white mug to his face and allow himself a long sip. He only seemed to notice my arrival as I approached to join him, lowering his mug to address me as I leaned on the counter behind me at his side.

"Good morning," Lyle murmured. "I trust you slept well."

"I did," I admitted. "Why is it so late? I thought we were supposed to be leaving half an hour ago."

"You both had a pretty hard day yesterday, so I let you sleep in," Lyle explained, outstretching his mug to set it down on the counter beside him and turn back to face it. A half-filled glass pot of coffee had been situated on the surface behind where he was standing and a second white mug, identical to the first, sat beside it. As he went on speaking, he carefully proceeded to pour the dark coffee into the second mug. "Once Lottie got up, I was sure that you'd be along soon after. I brewed us some coffee, since Lottie doesn't drink it. I told her that we could arrive a little bit late today, as long as we're there by nine."

Lyle finished pouring the cup, setting down the pot and relocating the full mug closer to me.

"I don't have milk or sugar, so that's all there is today," Lyle went on. He plucked his own mug from the counter again, shifting back around to rest his back on the edge of the counter as I was. "Anyway, we'll technically still be there on time. We don't officially open until nine o'clock as it is. It'll just be cutting into the time that we have to ourselves in the morning."

Lyle started to lift the mug to his mouth again to take another sip, but something seemed to stop him. He hastily lowered it again, offering a short gesture to let me know there was more he needed to say before he spoke again.

"Actually, wait, no," Lyle interjected himself. "That reminds me of something else I was going for today. I was thinking I'd give you the day off today. I understand how difficult it would be to go through such a loss and have to return to a ten-hour shift right afterward. I'll walk you back home after we eat some breakfast and then I'll come back to take Lottie to work. She's insisting that she would prefer to keep herself busy to prevent thinking about it so much. That's why she's already up and about right now, getting ready for work and such. She got up just a little while before you did and she's just in the shower right now."

Involuntarily, my eyes snapped to examine the hallway from where I stood, studying the surface of the wall in the direction of where the trickling water was coming from as if I was awaiting Lottie to come out and tell me herself. The blunt smack of the back of Lyle's free paw against my shoulder jolted me back to reality, turning my face back to see him shake his head at me in disapproval from over his mug.

"Come on, Digby. It's too early for that," he scolded, raising his mug again and taking a deep sip.

I brushed off the conversation, twisting around to pick up my own mug from the counter by the handle and turning back to hold it in front of me. I allowed myself a lengthy sip as Lyle had done, but the sudden nip of bitterness nearly caused me to spit the entire sip out and back into the mug. I hadn't ever once tried black coffee before, not from what I could remember, and clearly, it showed.

"What exactly happened with Isabelle?" I asked after choking down the sip. There was absolutely no way I was spitting up my drink in front of Lyle after he had gone through the effort to brew it for me. "Have you heard the full story?"

"Yes, I believe so," Lyle replied, pausing to take another sip of his coffee. "Well, I'm sure you were aware of her newest form of work. She's been engaged in competitive combat under the management of the Mario brothers. I think she's had that job for a little over a year now. Anyway, apparently she felt she wasn't doing enough to help out or to prove her strength, or something like that. She told Mario that she was ready for the best challenge he could give her, and he provided. Yesterday afternoon, she went up in battle with a monstrous fighter who calls himself Ganondorf. I have no idea if that's his real name or not. That's just what he's known as. He hadn't lost a single fight up until then and Isabelle had only had so much training. This caused a real ruckus from the audience once they knew what was coming and the ones that knew the danger begged Mario to call off the fight before it had begun, but he just ignored every single protest and went on announcing it."

"Why would he do that?" I urged to know. I somewhat anticipated an answer of 'I don't know' or 'He hadn't known' or something down that alley, but Lyle's answer arrived instantly.

"Money," Lyle replied simply. "Mario loves his money and getting more money where he can claim it. He knew the fight would have been highly demanded, so he only further pressed the advertising of it. He's always loved the concept of money, even he was first making his way into the world and didn't have that money yet. As soon as he started getting popular and earned that money, he would go on and on about the money he was earning. It's a little bit disgusting, if I'm to be honest with you."

"And that was where it ended?" I said as Lyle took in another sip of coffee. "She... you know... right in that room? Because Mario refused to call off the fight?"

"Yes and no," Lyle admitted, shifting in his stance to find something more comfortable as he leaned on the counter behind him. "She's not dead yet, but that's definitely on its way, so I don't want to get your hopes up. She really tried her best to endure the fight, but she stood no chance, if you'll excuse my blunt honesty. She almost instantly fell into a coma as her body tried to heal, but with the injuries she took... Well, I'm sure you can connect the dots."

Yes, I could. I gulped down another bite of the dark coffee in my mug as the words echoed through my mind, telling me and retelling me the story of just how I had lost my sister, but the same metallic squeak from before quickly drew me back into reality. The trickling of the shower ceased once more, followed by rustling down the hall. Lottie would have been out and about soon.

Apparently, though not very surprisingly, Lottie wasn't one to waste time getting ready. While the rustling down the hall endured, it didn't last as long as five minutes before I caught the sound of the door opening and closing again. Soft footsteps approached from the hallway, nearing the entrance where Lyle and I leaned against the counter to enjoy our coffee, and Lottie appeared at the opening. She had already dressed herself for the morning and applied her strikingly prominent mascara, though her hair had evidently not fully dried yet as she scrubbed it with a towel to do so as efficiently as she could manage. She slowed to a stop near the opening, her dark eyes jumping between Lyle and me in her realization that we were both up and about already and withdrew the towel from her damp hair, leaving it to drop like a curtain onto her shoulder.

"All right," Lyle said, noticing her arrival and reaching back to set down his mug on the counter behind him again. "Now that everyone's here, I'll start on breakfast. Lottie, I'm going to bring Digby back to his house after we eat, but I'll come back and pick you up for work. Why don't you both take a seat at the table?"

After the request, I carried my coffee mug to the table and took a seat. Lottie joined me at the table, sitting at my left like last night, and held her towel on her lap for the meal. Lyle kept himself busy at the counter for several minutes, soon presenting us with plates of regular buttered toast with a somewhat sheepish reminder that it was our fastest option. We ate together in a particularly brief meal, clearing our plates before Lottie vanished back through the hall to finish drying her hair. I helped Lyle gather the empty plates and stack them in the sink with our unfinished mugs. With the table tidied and a kind sunlight tickling the air, it was time to begin walking.

I shrugged on my coat, but Lyle didn't do the same—He told me that it would have been easier to pick it up when he retrieved Lottie to bring her to work. We stepped out into the world of glistening snow and pinching still temperatures, Lyle locked the door behind us, and we started off shuffling along the trampled snow.

The walk back home was far longer than I had previously anticipated. I had emerged outside expecting nothing more than my usual journey to the HHDA, but when it crept on and on and on, I realized that I had been mistaken. Ambling at each other's side, we treaded through rows of houses that started recognizable as the surrounding area of the house into ones that were less familiar. Separating from the neighborhoods, we proceeded through patches of forest paths bordered by towering trees and ventured through market squares. Neither of us spoke, as there wasn't much to say. My eyes bounced to take in all of my surroundings while Lyle accompanied me in silence, eyes front and paws tucked away into his pockets. Across the span of the walk, I asked him a few times for the current time. Eight twenty-five. Eight thirty-seven. Eight fifty-two. I mentioned the fact that he wasn't even going to arrive at home for Lottie by nine, that it was about to be even later before he would get to work, but he urged me not to worry about it.

We advanced the direct sidewalk towards my front door at what must have been a couple of minutes after nine. We passed the mailbox—I peeked into it on the way to discover nothing inside—And sauntered up to the house along the path that had clearly been shoveled before we had arrived. We came to a stop at the door, where I turned to face Lyle to exchange my goodbyes, but evidently he had more to say first.

"Just don't worry about working for now, okay?" Lyle said. His paws were still tucked deep away into his pockets. I wondered if he was feeling chilly and wasn't mentioning it to me. "This is something terrible that you're going through and I don't want you to put yourself through the pressure of doing your best work until you've adjusted. I'm not just talking about today. You can stay home until you're feeling better. I don't mean forever, or like a few months. You can take about a week to look after yourself and help yourself heal. But do let me know the night before when you plan to begin working again. That's the only thing I want to ask of you."

"Of course I can do that," I promised.

"Good." Lyle nodded slightly. "Well, I should be off. I've got quite a walk back."

"Oh, right. Good point," I agreed, setting my paw on the doorknob to open the door. "Goodbye, Mr. Lyle."

I had been expecting him to offer some kind of nod in subtle goodbye and head off down the path without a word—In fact, I had relied on it, since he wasn't particularly expressive at all—But his next move nearly rattled me out of my skin. His paw clamped over my shoulder, pulling me in and enveloping me in a firm embrace. My paw accidentally slipped from a grasp on the doorknob as his arms locked around me, holding me like he was shielding me from every little thing in the world. The motion took me by a surprise where I could only stand stiff, accepting it without complaint but not having the faintest clue what to do otherwise.

"I don't say this very often, but it blows me away how strong you are," Lyle murmured while I struggled to comprehend what was happening. "I mean it when I say I want you to take this time to look after yourself. I would much rather you do that than go back to work when you're not ready. Let me know if you need anything at all while you're away."

Words still failed me, my mind wiped clean, but at least I had processed the situation enough to move. My arms folded around Lyle in return, clinging close to him in our uncommon and unexpected hug. In that very moment, standing together in the snow under a cloudless sky, we were not coworkers sinking into each other's arms. We were family.

"I would bet anything that your sister is so proud of you, even now," Lyle went on. "She wouldn't want you to be in pain. She would want you to celebrate the memories you shared together and hold her close in that way. I'd say there's a good chance she's looking over you right now. Remember her in the way she'd most want to be remembered."

"Thank you," I whispered into his shoulder.

"And above all, she loved you more than anything else," Lyle told me. "She cared for you so, so deeply. As do the rest of us at Happy Home. I just want you to remember that. If there ever comes a time where you feel like you're lacking in that support or presence, you have friends that you can turn back to."

That might have been the very first moment that Lyle had genuinely called me his friend. We had started out as friendly acquaintances for many, many years, then I was simply his employee, he cast me out, he brought me back in, and now, at last, a friend. If there was anything I knew for certain about Lyle, it was that he didn't take that word lightly. I set my head down on his shoulder, savoring the embrace and accepting the moment as it currently stood.

It wasn't any half-hearted embrace, either. Our arms bolted around each other with the weight of a long-awaited reunion, standing without a twitch of movement as the minutes timelessly passed us by. This must have been as monumental a moment for Lyle as it was to me. With the bitterness that his life had been plunged into when Trevor and his daughters had left him behind and the close proximity of his acquaintance circle, I knew that he struggled with friendship such as this. He was there to support me and if he needed my support in return, then it wouldn't have been a question.

Lyle loosened his grip on me at last, withdrawing from the embrace and facing me once more. There wasn't a twinge of emotion creeping past his blue face, not a flicker in the dark eyes that sat behind his glasses, but that was fine. That was who he was. I didn't expect anything different. Even if his face was completely blank, I understood now the extent of the emotions hiding down past it.

"Goodbye, Digby," Lyle said, offering a gentle and reassuring touch to my arm with the pads of his paw before he turned away again, shuffling back down the shoveled path where we had come from.

The quiet desolation lingering in the house as I eased the door open implied of my parents' disappearance. The soft sunlight of morning blanketed the surfaces of the wood floor and the dining room table, an unbroken image of peace and hope and new beginnings. The table had been completely cleared off, likely at the result of it becoming too late for breakfast, all except for a short slip of paper that had been taped neatly at one side to the surface of the table. Someone had known that I would have been coming and left a note for me.

I unzipped my coat and shrugged it from my shoulders, draping it from a hook at the door. After hanging up my coat, I dismissed myself to the table, peeling the note from the table as my eyes flitted across the written text.

Digby,

I'm not sure when you'll be getting home or if you'll come home soon enough to see this rather than us being home to tell you ourselves. We've gone out to buy some groceries for the rest of the dinners this week. Please get yourself some breakfast if you haven't already. The fruit basket is in the kitchen.

Your mom and dad

Well, I'd already had breakfast at Lottie's, so there wasn't much I could have done about that. However, what I hadn't had was a full night's sleep after getting to bed so late last night. Squeezing in some extra rest might have been a good way to spend the waiting time before Mom and Dad would arrive at home. I placed the note back down onto the table, pasting it where it had been before and deciding on a brief nap, but an almost uncomfortably surreal sensation struck me like a brick from the moment I lifted my eyes.

For nothing longer than a moment, a fraction of a heartbeat before I regained control of my mind, the pale walls that enclosed me into the room were completely and utterly unknown. In that short period of time, I wouldn't have told the difference between not having set my eyes on them for a while and walking in here for the very first time. Once I remembered where I was, the subtle certainty of familiarity, the tingle of exploring someplace new still tickled the back of my mind. I knew these walls, I had been encased by them for twenty-one years of life, and still I was in a house that wasn't my own. I knew these walls and yet the urge to examine my new surroundings tugged at me.

The only sound to touch the air was the muffled footsteps as I left the dining room, carrying myself instead into the hall. Everything stood as it should have been; the broad borders, the doors separating me from the bedrooms and bathrooms, the wide opening to the living room, the stained-glass window at the back wall, and the flowers sitting beneath it, gouged into the dirt in a blue pot that sat on a light-wood end table. I reached the first door on the left, the door leading to my bedroom and shut in my absence, and clasped my paw over the doorknob to open the door. I was moments away from twisting it open, my paw perched over the curve of the knob, but a realization jolted me to a halt. Something had been different. I had taken notice of it on my way to the door, but hadn't fully registered it until this exact moment.

My ears swayed slightly at the sides of my head as my eyes flicked towards the end of the hall. There was a door at the end of the hall, the second and last door on the left, that always hung ajar a crack whenever my gaze brushed it arriving to and from the hallway. That same door had been closed in the time that I had been away, eliminating the glimpse of a view of the inside of the room. The door led to Isabelle's bedroom when she had once been staying in this house with me. I knew well why it was shut now and it didn't need to be spoken aloud. At this rate, all that was needed was vivid yellow tape slapped on in the shape of an X across the door.

Now, that actually was a room that I hadn't set foot in for years. The fact that I had called this house my home for longer than two decades and there was still a room that I hadn't seen with my own eyes for almost five years was utterly odd in itself. I abandoned my own bedroom door, instead drifting through the patches of sunlight enlightening the hallway floor to reach my sister's old room. The floorboards creaked with every cautious step, one after the other until I stood in front of the door that I hadn't so much as approached since someone had been staying there. My paw latched onto the doorknob, wrenching it and easing open the door as it whined into the space of the hallway.

The bedroom space diverted from mine so drastically that my eyes were already bouncing to take in every inch of the room. Not only were the walls painted the same color and the furniture of the bed, closet, and otherwise arranged in the same places as my own—Identicalness was a common approach for novice designs, but the repetition never settled as something I was specifically fond of—But there was so much more of... Well, everything. The entire space of the wall that I faced from the doorway had been overrun with images in black wooden frames. Each one was a figure of printed text and a different signature at the bottom. They were her graduation diplomas, each and every one of them, with one in the top corner given to her for high school at thirteen and nineteen more for various universities up until seventeen. The sight was nothing short of silencing, my eyes flitting between twenty physical examples of how hard she worked. At this point, it seemed like she had so much steady diligence that even time bent its rules for her.

"I don't know how I'm going to get any more up here," Isabelle told me. She was standing on the surface of her bed, the thick blankets crumpling under her weight, as she held up the newest frame above her head to the last opening on the wall, the high right corner. The bells in her ponytail jingled with every movement of her head as she glanced between the frame in her hand and the distance from the floor. "I'm going to have to start moving this onto another wall. Mom said this was a good stopping point and suggested I start settling down, but I don't know if she was serious. Could you grab me the hammer from my pillow?"

I started to advance forward, eyes prying for a better glance at the diplomas' text, but my shifting foot hit a blockage and accidentally kicked a lightweight object out of my path. A clicking sound like pencils or pens tumbling out onto the floor met the impact. My focus instantly dropped to my feet to discover not only the pink plastic cup of velvety pencils and pens with the little pom-poms on the end that I had just nudged with the side of my foot, but the disarray that cluttered the rest of the floor around it. She hadn't been shy with variety, either. Littering the floor sat sheets of paper, notebooks, pens and pencils like what I'd just kicked over, deserted clumps of clothing that probably no longer fit her, a quilt blanket that she herself had requested for the final chilly nights that she had been home, old and tattered miniature stuffed animals, and unpacked boxes stacking up in the corners of the room. Isabelle might have had a gentle heart like our mother, but I had forgotten just how untidy of an animal she had been. It was like a tornado had just ransacked all of her belongings and hurled them every which way.

"Jeez, how can you stand to live like this?" I complained, sending a disapproving eye around the unkempt room. "I can't even see the floor, much less walk in here."

"Excuse me, that's so rude," Isabelle shot back. She had been laying on her front on the bed—Only made because both Mom and Dad had asked her to make it this morning—With her head bowed into a book when I had passed by her open door. "I didn't ask you to critique my habits. I know exactly where everything is and that's what's important. If you don't like it, you can leave."

Mom had always asked Isabelle countless times to tidy up her room. Dad had even yelled at her once for it, which had earned her a clean room and a pair of dejected eyes as she sat on her bed in the results of it. Sometimes she cleaned up when she was asked to, but I'd noticed that the treasure of witnessing a wide-open floorspace in that room never lasted longer than three or four days, and that was if we were lucky. If I walked past the door and the room was just as cluttered as ever, especially with Mom's reminders, I took it upon myself to remind her—But it was less well received from me and was most commonly met with defiance. With almost five years of her being away, she'd finally set the record for the longest time spent avoiding cleaning. But now she was gone.

I bent down, plucking the plastic cup from the floor and poking the writing utensils back in one by one. I returned the cup to the desk beside the head of her bed—Empty-surfaced, for what reason?—And ducked my head once again to resume the task I had begun. First, I gathered up all of the papers strewn across the floor, straightening them with a short tap against the surface of the desk and laid them neatly in the middle, almost as if in expecting her to return to it at some point. I did the same with the notebooks, piling them up together in a single stack and positioning them on top of the sheets on the desk. It wasn't much yet, maybe ten percent of the mess, but at least with that much, patches of carpet became visible amidst the chaos.

I arranged the blankets on the bed, tucking them back into place and repositioning the pillows. I hoisted up the quilt blanket that had sunken into a heap next to the bed, folding it into a rectangle and draping it across the ending rim of the bed. I took up the shabby toys scattered across the floor and lined them all up in a row together in front of the pillows. Each one of them was worn down and flimsy after years of use, but still they smiled. Isabelle had always clung to her toys, but only four of them were still intact today. Even now, I recalled a moment when we had tossed an older one into the washing machine to freshen it up and instead of doing that, it completely tore it apart.

I left the bed, rounding up all of the clothes until I had accumulated a heaping pile next to the dresser. The task of tidying up the clothes was considerably more time-consuming, leaving me kneeled on the floor for several minutes in active effort. I folded up the shirts, tucked away the skirts, wrapped up the pants, and balled up the socks. The shirt drawer proved a challenge to shut, resisting as the number of them congested the open space, but I managed to slide it closed. I climbed back up to my feet to the sight of the room sustaining full orderliness, from the spotless carpet floors to the frames bolted to the wall to the neatly-prepared bed.

"You wanna know something?" Isabelle said. She had previously plopped down into a seat amidst the rumpled blankets of her bed and appeared to be utilizing the surface of the mattress as her flat surface for a half-hearted sketch. I was seated on the floor with my back resting against the wall and since these were the first words either of us had spoken in at least ten minutes, I had begun to entertain myself with the idea of what we might have been having for lunch. "I think I'm going to be a teacher when I grow up."

"What about your other goals?" I asked. Becoming a teacher was the first goal of many that she had brought up to me.

"Well, I'll just have to put those on hold," Isabelle decided, shifting in her seat to study her sketch at a better angle. "I'll first teach some classes, then I'll go for something bigger like a doctor or a world leader. Or maybe I'll be a florist, like Mom used to be."

"And Dad," I reminded her. "That's how they met, remember? Also, teachers don't make that much money."

"Who needs that?" Isabelle replied.

Leaning on the doorframe, I caught a full view of the room around me. The window on the other side of the room, decorated with drawn-back curtains, uplifted the entire room from corner to corner with rays of golden sunlight. With the cleanliness of the room and the pure light sitting in the air, every inch in front of me was polished with serenity. It was the serenity of the perfect goodbye, the final touch of beauty before the memory was no more. In the sunlight, I could sense her. Her beaming smile, her warm demeanor, the fire of her passion in life. Just for now, she was here for the very last time. Making her mark. Saying goodbye. She was drifting off into the next world, fading away into the unknown. She was leaving me behind, but she was off on another journey now, slipping from my grasp with eyes forward.

Something had stilled within me. I wasn't sure if I could have accurately described it out loud if I tried to. Maybe the knowledge that my sister was in a better place now eased my troubled mind. Maybe the universe had silenced me, coming face-to-face with the extent of life's power and realizing just how little I could do against it. All that I knew with complete certainty was that this, at long last, after years of trial and error, was peace in its truest form.

The front door emitted the familiar groan of its opening. The rustling and crinkling of grocery bags emerged into the house, closely accompanied by labored footsteps.

"Digby, are you here?" Mom called out from the entrance. A thump of a particularly hefty-sounding bag being set down sounded from the same area. "We're home!"

A different realization surfaced. As I listened to the sound of my mother's voice calling out to me, it was right at that moment that I realized how at least half of the life that I knew were the tiny little subtleties that pulled it all together, the way things just were and were so inconspicuous that nobody ever considered it, and how much I appreciated them. The simple things, the things that arrived without effort, the things in life that had always been there and that would always be there. The little things that blessed me with a temporary and unexpected shiver of satisfaction, like the warmth of springtime or hearing I'd be enjoying my favorite food for dinner or even just the feeling of a bath after a draining day. If life provided us with all of these little blessings that concealed themselves in everyday lives for those open to accepting new things to find them, dwelling on what dejected me wasn't quite as worth it. Maybe if I took life slowly and accepted each tiny blessing as they came around, then maybe I'd be okay.

I removed my weight from the doorframe and returned to the front entrance to help my parents store away the groceries.

I ventured into the break from work with steadiness and a kindness towards my own needs. Even after such a loss, it would have been significantly easier to look after myself and resist the temptation to blame myself for resting than the last time I had been asked to leave work for an extended period of time. There were several optimistic factors that served my newest situation to rely on. Not only was the period shorter, a definite stretch of time, but the future clarified itself because of it. Being sent off as a self-care break rather than being rejected for my mistakes and having been done so with grace and thoughtful words certainly eliminated the weight of guilt. And besides, I had options of support all around me now in case something happened.

The day that I returned home, I hardly went a moment without some kind of reassuring touch, like Dad rubbing my back or Mom cradling my face in her paws or a squeezing hug from either of them. It was almost like I was the one who had been away for years and finally stumbling into their arms again. They exchanged countless encouraging words like Lyle had as we had stood together on my doorstep. In return, I reiterated the experience I had shared this morning with Isabelle's final goodbye. Together, we agreed on the promise that no matter what happened, we would have always had each other to count on and that we would always be just fine.

Every waking moment, I awaited news of my sister. Of course, I already understood well what the news would have been and had come around to accept it as fate. Hearing the words wouldn't have been the most pleasant, but after processing it day after day, I'd slowly begun to numb myself to them. Even if it was about to be bad news, as I knew that it was, I still endured the wait by means of closure. The days crept on considerably slower, taking its time between sunrise and sunset, like each moment had opened up to its full potential. Every single night at seven without fail, the living room phone rang out with a call from Lottie, checking in the minute she arrived home from work and questioning how I was doing that day. For the next couple of days, I took a break, surrendering to the peace in uneventful routines.

All of that changed on Sunday the fourth, and quite suddenly, at that. Lunch had been sandwiches that day, lettuce and tomato slices, and the three of us kept ourselves seated together around the table after we had all finished eating. The meal was still settling in our stomachs, so we sat around for a bit longer, tossing lighthearted chats back and forth under the glow of early noon illuminating the room.

"If there's going to be more snow, I want to be able to help out with the shoveling," I pointed out. "You two always do it before I get up in the morning so that I can have a break. But when do you take a break?"

"Right now, it seems," Dad said, leaning in his chair as he sat across from me to sneak a glance through the window at the door. "We were just out there this morning and most of it had already melted away."

"That's true," Mom agreed from my left, following his focus to the window. "It's getting a bit late for snow, anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if it melts all away tonight and tomorrow night. Next time, though, sweetheart."

The ringing of the phone interjected the conversation. Mom was the first to move, setting her plate aside and easing herself up from the table.

"I'll get that. Just continue on without me," Mom told us. She stepped out of the way of her chair, moving past the table corner with a careful eye, and started off to disappear into the hallway.

In Mom's absence, I offered to gather up the dirty dishes in the wait for her return. I stacked the plates, discarded with crumbs, one after the other as the ringing cut short in the answering of the phone.

"Shih Tzu residence." Mom's voice was distant in the other room, yet each word was still audible.

I grasped the stack of plates, delivering them with me to elbow my way through the door into the kitchen. Once I emerged, I noticed that the bowls and coffee mugs from breakfast were still clustered in the sink. I lay the plates in the last open space in the sink, twisting the hot water handle and running the water as it splattered across the dirty dishes. The rumble of Mom's voice from the direct other room muffled against the wall. I passed the plates under the hot water, briefly rinsing them off before I shut off the water once again. Dad had risen from his seat by the time I nudged my way back into the dining room, standing back behind it to perch his elbows on the back rim. I withdrew my own chair, plopping back down into the cushion, and raised my eyes to meet Dad's to listen as he began to speak.

"Well, Digby," Dad began, glancing at me from around the table. "Now that we're coming up on springtime here and the temperature's warming up, maybe we should think about taking a short little vacation to regroup together as a family. I haven't brought this up to your mother yet, but I've been thinking of renting out that old cabin we stayed in a couple years ago while you weren't working. What do you think about that?"

"I'm working now," I reminded him, leaning forward to rest my own arms on the table. "Do we have the time for that?"

"Yeah, we could just take a weekend off or something," Dad replied.

"Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much," Mom said on the phone in the other room. Something in her voice had subdued in a choked-up way, but whether it was emotion, tears, or just a crack in her voice, I couldn't tell. Right after she spoke, I heard her set down the phone back onto the receiver.

"I could go ahead and give Lyle a call ahead of time," Dad went on, paying not even an ounce of attention to Mom's conversation. "I'd let him know that—"

Mom was sweeping back into the room with a swifter step than she had left with. She crossed the room back to her seat with a loud sniffle, clasping a paw over her mouth for the last few steps before she slammed right into an embrace as I sat in my seat, flinging her arms around me with a crushing grip. I knocked into her with a force that rattled my bones from the firm embrace, squeezed against her with the bone of her shoulder prodding into my cheek. Before I could have even opened my mouth to ask what was happening, what all of this was about, a shuddering gasp of sobs springing to life escaped from her beside me.

"Maisie?" Dad pressed. Now that my face was buried in Mom's shoulder, I failed to witness his facial reaction, but the concern stood prominent in his voice.

"She's alive," Mom declared. "She's alive. Isabelle's alive. I just got the call from Mario. He visited her in the hospital to find her conscious and carrying out conversation."

Relief, as powerful and vigorous as it could come, pooled into my chest with such might that it felt to crack right open. In a fraction of a second, my heart had launched to sour—No, something far more weightless, something that no word in any language could have described. Isabelle was alive.

Isabelle was alive.

"She's alive," Dad echoed, taking this in. The tone had shifted drastically in his voice, developing into the audible sound of the weightlessness that had just overrun my chest. His footsteps tapped against the wood as he neared while I locked my arms around Mom in return, as efficiently as I could manage at the odd angle. The next thing that I knew, standing at my other side, Dad's arms had slung around us both. "What do you know? She's so strong, not even a coma can take her down."

As Mom shivered with gasping tears beside me, any fragments of my composure diminished beyond my control. Suddenly, I was clutching her close to me, my eyes pressed up tight as tears spilled down my face and strangled sobs clawing from my throat in hoarse coughs. Just like that, it was like I would never manage to calm my tears again, choking on constant gulps of air as the tears only kept streaming on and on until my entire cheeks had been dampened.

"She's a warrior, that she is," Dad stated at last. His voice, already breaking with teary emotion like the rest of us, seemed to resonate deep in the embrace. "She's so strong."

It wasn't the turn that I'd expected to take at this point, or quite how I'd expected that I would have been rejoicing, for that matter. But that was a lesson that I had become all too familiar with these past few days. The final truth was that nothing was ever as it seemed. Sometimes joy poured out in the form of tears, sometimes grief proved to be the very key to the deepest peace. Sometimes, even life threw experience at you just for it to turn out that it had been a test to find the best version of yourself buried far beneath the surface.

That was the beauty of it all. Life was amazing, terrible, forgiving, merciless, unpredictable, and utterly, utterly beautiful. And that right there was life itself in its truest form.

. . .

I first called Lyle on the evening of Monday the sixth. I had brought up the idea of returning to work to Mom and Dad earlier that evening. They had both sat me down on the couch, running over the positives and negatives of that decision to keep me well informed. They agreed that getting back out there into the world and doing what was in my power to help animals offered a sense of self-fulfillment that nothing else could, but they also expressed concern about going back too soon. They warned that if I stumbled upon the decision too hastily, I'd only burn myself out again. I assured them that with sources of support surrounding me at all times, my twin sister recovering in the hospital, and my peaking mental health, it was all I was waiting for.

That same night, I claimed a seat on the end of the couch and plucked the phone from the receiver to call Lyle about that very subject. It was nearly seven thirty when I made the call, so I contacted his home phone rather than his work phone. I let him know that I had been considering my options recently and had decided that it was in my best interest to return to work the very next day—Precisely what he had asked me to say the first day he had sent me away to look after myself in my grief. He trusted that I knew what was best for me and allowed me to return to the office the next day of the eighth. I had been prepared for the call to end there, with the announcement being the only statement that needed giving, but he asked one more request of me. He wanted me to share any recent updates of Isabelle and her situation, as he was no longer in the loop with it all. I could do that. Both he and Lottie would certainly be surprised as to where she was now.

On Tuesday, March seventh, my old schedule was revived. I was torn from sleep at the beeping of my six-thirty alarm, smacking the button to silence it and dragged myself out of bed with almost surprising ease. I dressed speedily, stopped in the bathroom mirror to check that I looked presentable, snagged an apple from the fruit basket on the kitchen counter, shrugged on my coat, and ventured into the world of lively painted skies in the rising of the sun. I shuffled past damp patches of melting snow, through sweeping breezes of lukewarm air, from steady footsteps carrying me further towards my destination. This wasn't the same world as the one I had lived in last year, that was for sure. A different world, a different animal. A different life.

Let's do it right this time.