Turn 4 of 11

Tell her something close to the truth — that you've been preoccupied with a problem you can't explain yet

You unwrap the bread. It's a stalling move and you both know it, but the motion gives you something to do with your hands while you pick through the wreckage of every lie you've told her in the last three weeks and try to find one that's close enough to the truth to feel honest in your mouth. The crust crackles under the cloth. You pull a piece off and hold it, warm, between your fingers.

"There's something going on with me," you say. "Something I can't explain yet. Not won't — can't. I don't have the language for it."

Tamsin's expression doesn't change, but something behind it shifts. She picks up her phone, turns it over, sets it back down again — the gesture of a woman deciding whether to put a weapon away or keep it in reach. The tag tired flickers above her head, and you try not to look at it.

"That's the most honest thing you've said in weeks," she says. "And it's still a non-answer."

"I know."

She reaches past you for a piece of bread, tearing it with her fingers the way she always does, and for a moment the two of you are just standing in a kitchen eating fresh bread, the way you've done a hundred times before. The cardamom candle spits once and settles. A car alarm starts up on the street below and stops.

"You don't have to tell me today," she says. Her voice has moved from interrogation to something else — not soft, because Tamsin doesn't do soft, but edged down, the volume lowered the way she does when she means it.

"But you have to tell me before it eats you alive. I've watched you carry things before, Wren. You're not good at it. You think you're stoic and you're actually just constipated."

You laugh, and it surprises both of you. The bread is warm and salty and real, and for a moment the history log and its ghost entries feel very far away — a problem for a version of you that exists five minutes from now. Tamsin's tag still reads thinks-you-resent-her, and the weight of that sits on you like a stone in a pocket, but she is looking at you the way she looked at you before the tags, before the edits, before someone started tuning your sister like a radio.

"Before it eats me alive," you repeat. "That's the bar."

"That's the bar." She bumps your shoulder with hers, and it's such a small thing, but you feel the tag above her head like a wound you can't tell her about, and the identifier fragments — H, 7, K — are already dissolving in your memory like sugar in warm water.