ArtFlow

She hadn't been back in four years. The house looked smaller than she remembered, which everyone says and nobody quite believes until it happens to them. The garden was different — her mother had planted things she didn't recognize, reorganized everything while she was gone, which felt like a message even if it wasn't meant as one. Her sister opened the door before she knocked. Of course she did — she always knew when someone was coming, some leftover childhood instinct neither of them had ever been able to explain. She looked older. They both did. Four years does that. They hugged in the way people hug when they have things to say that aren't ready yet — brief, genuine, careful. Then her sister stepped back and said coffee? and she said yes and they went inside and that was the beginning.

The kitchen was exactly the same. That was the thing about the kitchen — it resisted change. Same tiles, same smell, same drawer that never closed properly on the left side. She sat at the same chair she'd always sat at and felt fourteen and thirty-two simultaneously, which was disorienting in a way she hadn't prepared for. Her sister made coffee without asking how she took it because she already knew. They talked about easy things first — the flight, the traffic, a neighbor who had done something mildly dramatic that served as useful neutral territory. Neither of them mentioned why she'd left or why it had taken four years to come back. That was fine. They had time. The house wasn't going anywhere. The drawer still didn't close properly. Some things wait.

On the second day she found the box in her old room. Her mother had labeled it with her name in handwriting that hadn't changed in thirty years. Inside: things from before. A journal she didn't remember keeping. Photographs from a trip she'd half-forgotten. A letter she'd written and never sent to someone she'd spent years trying to stop thinking about. She sat on the floor and went through it slowly. Her sister appeared in the doorway at some point and sat down without being invited, which was the right thing to do. They looked at the photographs together. Her sister pointed at one and laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of her. She laughed too. It was the first time the house felt like hers again.

The morning she was leaving her sister made breakfast. Proper breakfast — eggs, toast, the works — which was her way of saying things she didn't have words for. They ate mostly in silence, but a comfortable silence, the kind that means something has shifted. At the door her sister hugged her longer this time. No careful this time. She said come back sooner and she said I will and for the first time in four years she meant it. On the plane she opened the journal from the box. The first entry was from when she was sixteen — dramatic, certain about everything, completely wrong about most of it. She smiled at it. Then she opened to a blank page near the back and started writing. Not about the past. About the morning. The eggs. Her sister's laugh. The drawer that still didn't close. Small things. The ones worth keeping.