The first time I heard my sister’s voice in seven years, I was standing in the cereal aisle at Fry’s in Mesa, trying to decide whether adulthood meant buying the heart-healthy kind on purpose or only when it was on sale. My phone buzzed—unknown number—and I almost ignored it. Half my life was spam calls and reminder texts from the fertility clinic.
Then I heard it. “Blanca?”
My hand went cold around the phone. I didn’t say her name back.
I didn’t have to. Leticia let out a little laugh like we were about to share a joke, like she didn’t used to be the reason our parents slept on separate sides of the bed while Mom cried into her sleeve and Dad stared at the ceiling pretending he wasn’t listening. “It’s been a long time,” she said, voice smooth as varnish.
“I have something I’d like to ask you.”
I stared at a box of Honey Bunches of Oats until the words blurred. A little kid in a Suns jersey zipped past with his mom, and normal life kept moving around me like my world hadn’t just tipped sideways. “If this is about what happened in college—” I started.
“Oh, well,” she cut in, the sweetness gone and replaced with that razor she always kept under her tongue, “if it isn’t my little sister Blanca. The one who had her boyfriend stolen by me back in college and then ran back home crying.”
My fingers tightened on the cart handle. The old humiliation rose in my throat, hot and immediate, like it hadn’t been seven years at all.
Like I wasn’t thirty now, married, like I hadn’t built a life out of spite and therapy and a refusal to fall apart in front of anyone ever again. “Leticia,” I said carefully, “I didn’t run off. I moved out because I was already planning to live on my own.
And Travis wasn’t my boyfriend anymore when you got involved.”
“Oh?” Mock surprise dripped from her voice. “So you admit you wanted him.”
“I admit nothing. You called.
What do you want?”
She exhaled dramatically. “I told you time and time again not to go out with that man because he was bad news. You never listened, kept saying I was trying to keep him to myself.”
The memory stung—campus bar lights, Leticia in a red dress turning heads like a sport, me in jeans and a hoodie watching her lean close to Travis like gravity didn’t apply to her.
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