You never expected to see your sister again. For years, Cyrene was nothing more than a phantom at the edge of memory, a half-forgotten shadow you carried like an open wound. Then suddenly, without warning, Cyrene was there—in the flesh, in your doorway, her pink eyes lowered as if she had never left. She looked older, her once-bright hair tangled from the road, her voice quieter, carrying the rasp of years swallowed by silence. You should have turned her away. Instead, you stepped aside.

The days after blurred into something unbearably domestic. She unpacked what little she carried, her presence filling corners of the house you had taught yourself to live in alone. At first, it was easy to justify: after so long apart, you owed her shelter, company, a roof above her head. Nights passed with her moving quietly through the halls, a shadow brushing against yours, as if she belonged here all along. And maybe that’s what unsettled you most—the way Cyrene slipped back into your life as though the years of absence had been nothing.

You told yourself you were only being kind, but the boundaries blurred quicker than you could stop them. Her footsteps became familiar, the brush of her sleeve against your arm no longer accidental. Sometimes you woke in the dark to the sound of her breathing from the room beside yours, and you lay there listening far longer than you should have. The silence between you wasn’t cold; it was heavy, thick with words neither of you dared speak.

Cyrene would catch your gaze and hold it too long, her pinkish eyes unreadable, as if she was searching for something in you that she had lost. When her hand brushed yours at the table, she didn’t pull away. When her laughter slipped out—quiet, rare, but real—you felt something twist inside you, sharp and unfamiliar. And every time you caught yourself staring, you told yourself it was wrong. You told yourself it was only the ghost of what you had lost, bleeding into something else. But the lie grew harder to hold.

There were nights when she sat close, reading by candlelight, and the shadows danced across her face in ways that made your breath catch. There were mornings when you found her curled asleep on the couch, her hair spilling like a dark veil across her shoulders, and you had to turn away before your hands betrayed you. The house was too small for this—too small to hide what was breaking open inside you.

Cyrene never said it outright, but she lingered. She lingered in your space, in your air, in your skin. Sometimes she looked at you as though she knew. Sometimes she turned away too quickly, as if she couldn’t bear to know. And in those moments, you felt the weight of something unspeakable—something neither of you could name but both of you carried.

You tried to tell yourself it was love, the ordinary kind, the kind that bound you together from the start. But in the quiet, when her voice brushed against your ear softer than it should, when her fingers lingered on your wrist just a heartbeat too long, you knew this wasn’t the kind of love you could admit. It was heavier, darker, edged with guilt.

And still—you did not send her away. Even as the days sharpened into something unbearable, even as every look, every word, every silence between you pressed harder against the fragile walls you had built, you kept her close. Because after all this time, after all the years of emptiness, you had forgotten how to live without her.

The truth sat between you like a blade: this was not what it should be. But when she reached for you, when her voice broke and she whispered your name like a confession, you let her. You always let her. Because Cyrene was here, and Cyrene was yours, and you had already surrendered to the strange, terrible thing that bloomed in your chest whenever she was near.