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"Your old building. I sweet-talked the super out of your forwarding address." She laughs. "And then I sweet-talked this one with a scone. He says you owe him for August and that Gerald cannot live in the hallway."

I let her in. Gerald goes on the milk crate. Birdie stands in the middle of my four hundred square feet, taking in the mattress, the hot plate, the one folding chair, and for once in her life, she doesn't fill the silence with something about the universe. She just looks at it. Looks at what the last month cost me, laid out in a room the size of a parking space.

"This is where you've been," she says quietly.

"This is where I've been."

She sets the grocery bag down carefully, like it's full of eggs, and turns around. All the new-age flakiness falls off her face, and underneath is my little sister, the furrow between her brows admitting she knows she’s in the doghouse.

"I've been rehearsing this the whole bus ride," she says, "and I had a whole thing to say. It was gonna be beautiful, but I’m skipping it, Ag. You take your clothes off for strangers to pay back a loan I begged you to cosign. And when the one thing hanging over you was that nobody could ever find out, I blabbed it. Because I always tell somebody. I suck. I just suck."

"Birdie—"

"I'm not done, and if you jump in, I'll cry, and I want to get through this as a functioning adult." She takes a breath. "You've been my mom since forever. You did all of it. And I paid you back by handing you the bill for every mess I ever made and calling it 'us being close.' It wasn't close. It was me, standing on you, to keep my chin above water. And I didn't even notice I was doing it, because you never once made me look down."

I have to sit on the folding chair.

"So this part I didn't rehearse," she says, and reaches into the grocery bag, and pulls out not eggs but an envelope. Fat, rubber-banded, a little crumpled.

"What is that?"

"It's six hundred and forty dollars. And there's going to be more, on the fifteenth, and the one after that." She sets it on the milk crate next to Gerald like an offering. "I got a job. A real one, with a name tag and a schedule and a guy named Doug who's the boss of me. It's at a plant nursery. Turns out, the one useful thing to come out of the goat disaster is that I can keep things alive that aren't goats. I've been there three weeks. This is all of it. I didn't spend any of it on crystals, I want that on the record."

I stare at the envelope. Every reflex I own is already moving. I open my mouth to say no, keep it, I've almost got Sal handled, I don't need⁠—

"Don't." Birdie points at me. "I can see the whole speech loading up behind your eyes. Don't you dare 'I've got it handled' me. You’ve handled it for too long. That's the actual problem, Ag. Not the money. Not even my big mouth. It's that you decided a long time ago that letting anybody help you is the same thing as being weak, and you'd rather take your clothes off for strangers than let your own sister carry a bit of the problem that's got both our names on it."

Both our names on it. She's never once said it like that, like it was hers too, like it was always hers too.

"It's my debt," she says. "It's got my dumb dream and my scraggly signature all over it. You've been carrying the whole thing alone because you're the fixer and I let you, because it was easier. I'm done letting you. Take the envelope. I am helping No arguing."

I’ve always been the one who helps, because being the one who accepts help felt like standing in a doorway with the red lipstick on and letting the whole world look. It turns out, my little sister, the leakiest, floatiest, most exasperating person I have ever loved, figured that out about me before I did.

I take the envelope.

It's the hardest thing I've done all week, and I stood in a parking lot this afternoon and told three billionaires to wait, so that is a genuinely competitive field.

"Okay," I say. My voice does something humiliating on the word. "Okay. Thank you."

Birdie bursts into tears immediately, because of course she does, and then I'm crying, and Gerald presides over the whole thing from his milk crate like a leafy green judge.

When we surface, she wipes her nose on my one clean dish towel, which I ignore, and narrows her eyes at me. "Okay. Now. Unrelated. There is a video going around."

Everything in me goes still. "A video? So?"

"Of a strip-mall parking lot. Three extremely handsome men in suits that cost more than my car, standing outside a dental office, apparently getting told off by a woman in red lipstick." She folds her arms. "The whole time I'm looking at it I’m thinking, God, what a lucky, dramatic, mysterious woman, imagine being her, and then an hour ago, I looked at it again." She leans in. "Agnes. Aggie. Look at me and tell me that is not you."

"It's me," I say.

Birdie makes a sound only dogs should be able to hear.

"And you're going to keep it to yourself," I add, shaking my finger at her. "I mean it. This is the biggest secret I have ever trusted you with, and it stops with you."

"I will take it to my grave⁠—"

"You told a barista I had cramps in March."

"That was the old me!" She grabs both my hands, beaming and ridiculous. "Ag. Three of them? Okay, no, stop, I have four hundred questions and you are going to answer every one but first"—she glances at the envelope, then back at me, and the goofy drains out, and my actual sister is looking at me— "the loan. That guy. Sal. What happens now?"