"You overreacted. Didn't want to go to school. I walked you there."

He remembers explaining the politics of it for his little sister, as if it would cheer her up. So hard to look back to that world that's gone, that family that he can't ever touch. This older woman is more like his mother than his sister, for all that he can see the shadow of the girl he knew. And perhaps it's that, that lets the words escape, melancholy.

"I should have known then. Maybe if we'd taught you better, things would have been different."