Setting Yourself on Fire
The photo came up on my Instagram feed on a Tuesday morning in October, and for a few seconds my brain simply refused to process what I was seeing. My brother Dylan, in a navy suit. A woman in white beside him, laughing.
His hand at her waist, her veil trailing across the grass. A caption that said Mr. and Mrs.
Miller, with the date from the previous day. He had gotten married the day before. My hands started shaking before I understood why they were shaking.
I set my coffee down and called him. Voicemail. I called again.
Voicemail. I kept calling because the alternative was accepting the only explanation available, and my mind was not yet equipped to hold it. On maybe the twelfth call, someone answered.
Not Dylan. “Stop calling,” Haley said. Her voice was cold the way tile is cold, no warmth in any direction.
“Where is Dylan? Why wasn’t I there? What happened?”
I heard him in the background, muffled, not coming to the phone, not saying my name, not fixing anything.
Then Haley laughed. It was a sharp, specific sound. The kind that communicates contempt with precision.
“Listen to yourself,” she said. “You’re pathetic. We don’t want you there.
This is our life now.”
The line went dead. I want to describe what happened inside me in that moment, but the honest answer is that nothing happened. I went still.
Not numb, not shattered, not dramatic. Just absolutely still, sitting on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and the phone dark in my hand, because the sentence had been so large and had arrived so cleanly that my body had not yet found a response for it. Fifteen years.
My name is Brooke. I am thirty-eight years old. My brother Dylan is twenty-nine.
That nine-year gap is a number. What it contained was not a number. When our mother died, I was twenty-three and Dylan was fourteen.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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