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When Anna was fourteen, her parents got divorced.
She and her sister, Phoebe, both stayed with their mom, but their little brother, Zach, was left with their dad. He was only six years old, and struggled the most out of all of them the change. Anna had promised Zach that they would write letters and send presents. The custody agreement said that they were supposed to be able to visit in the summers and over holidays. They were supposed to be able to call whenever they wanted. They were supposed to still be a family, even when they were miles apart.
They were supposed to be able to do a lot of things.
When Anna was eighteen, the visits stopped. Their father had been reassigned to the other side of the country and their mother said it was just too expensive to travel back and forth every summer. Anna tried to understand that, even if it didn’t feel fair, and that year she and Phoebe had tried to surprise Zach with a birthday present to make up for the broken promise. They had saved up for six months, pooling tips from their waitress jobs to afford the shipping on a die cast transforming robot figure from a show Zach had loved since he was little. The present had been returned two weeks later, and when Anna confronted her mother about the bad address, she got an apology that felt genuine at the time.
The toy was shipped off again, and Anna never got a thank you card back from Zach.
When Anna was twenty-one, she moved out of her mother’s house. Phoebe followed her a few months later, going into a trade school while Anna pursued a business degree a few cities away. She would drive home to visit every other weekend and help her mother with chores around the house, and one day went up to the attic to find things for a community garage sale her mother had volunteered to join. In an old box with bent corners and a torn off label, Anna found the transforming robot toy with the birthday card still tucked into the packaging. Anna didn’t confront her mother.
She just hid the box in her backpack, drove back to college, and cried to Phoebe over the phone
When Anna was twenty-five, Zach was pressured by their father to join the military. He was getting hazed and breaking bones while Anna was getting a manicure for her graduation walk. He never got to hear the speech she gave to her classmates, or see the standing ovation she got. She and Phoebe went out to celebrate that night after their mother went to bed, and - in a moment of drunken bravery - Anna had tried to tag her brother in the photos.
But Zach didn’t have a social media profile to tag.
When Anna was twenty-seven, Zach died. He was revived and rushed to a hospital, but neither she nor Phoebe knew. They were learning how to make chicken stir fry that didn’t come from a takeout box and how to keep pests out of a windowsill garden box. They didn’t know their mother was no longer one of Zach’s emergency contacts, and hadn’t been for a long while. They didn’t know how close they’d come to losing their baby brother.
They wouldn’t learn for another year.
When Anna was twenty-eight, a woman named Ava York reached out to them. Anna learned that her brother had enlisted, died, and been discharged with a heart condition that couldn’t be fixed all within the last year. She learned that he went almost exclusively by “Ze” now because his relationship with their father had so thoroughly fallen apart that he couldn’t stand sharing a name anymore. She learned that he had moved out to a distant world seed and was going to college online.
She learned that he was in a bad place, mentally, and his mom his sergeant was worried about him.
When Anna was still twenty-eight, she and Phoebe met up with Sgt York in a hub world and traveled to Ze’s world seed together. She felt like a shaken up soda bottle the entire trip, and somehow managed not to cry when they first saw Ze waiting for them at the spawn area. He had gotten taller, and his hair was cut shorter, and lighter than she remembered. He had their dad’s broad shoulders and sturdy build but had grown into their mother’s nose and ears. He looked so, so tired.
Anna didn’t tell him any of these things.
Instead, she gave him his birthday present (fourteen years delayed) and pulled him into a long-overdue hug sandwich with Phoebe, crying loudly so that no-one else in earshot would hear him sniffling.
When Anna was thirty, she again met up with Phoebe in that same hub world, and they traveled to Ze’s world seed together. They met up with Ze’s friend Moe and were smuggled into a busy, chaotic house to surprise him for his twenty-third birthday. The look on his face (surprise, confusion, then joy, all in that order) was worth the twenty minutes crouching awkwardly behind the couch waiting for their cue.