7.

I move further into the room, each step taking me closer and close to her bedside.

"Of course I came." I say, my voice a little shaky. I don't know why I'm so nervous right now. It's my sister, yet, it feels like I'm talking to a stranger.

So much time has separated us now, that's exactly what she is. She doesn't know anything about me or her life and neither do I.

"It's good to see you." Her voice is raspy and dry.

I inch closer and sit down in the chair pushed up beside her bed.

She turns over, my hands instinctively reaching for her as she does so. She looks so fragile, a bag of bones rolling over in the bed to lay on her side facing me.

Her eyes have dark circles pressed in below them and her lips are cracked and thin.

It's striking how different she looks from me. Even though we are twins, we have never favored. Where I got our mom's green eyes and dark hair, she got our dad's blonde hair and blue eyes. Our parents used to joke about how they had each made a mini version of themselves.

But now the differences are so much more evident. So stark. She's pale and thin and sickly, while I'm athletic and tan from days spent laying out with Gabby and Ella by the pool.

"Where the hell have you been?" I finally ask, leaning back in my chair as I watch her eyes move slowly over me.

"Lots of places." She whispers back, coughing a little.

I stare at her.

That's all she has to say? Just that she's been lots of places? Of course I already know that.

"How could you leave your baby?" I ask her, feeling the large wedge between us even as I sit a couple of feet away.

She blinks slowly. I think she's going to go back to sleep but she sighs, letting her eyes close.

"It was for the best, Hayden." She tells me. "I couldn't be what she needed."

"So you just ditched her at a Wendy's?" I balk at her. "You could have brought her to a hospital, or sought out adoption, or...or called me."

"I didn't want to burden your life." She says around a yawn. Like she is casually talking about the weather and not the abandonment of her own child.

"That doesn't matter, Alice." I shoot back. "She's just a baby. She needed-."

"She needed to not be with me." She cuts me off. "I'm not any good for her and I know that. She deserved a chance."

"But you-."

"I didn't even know I was pregnant." She cuts me off again. "I didn't even know, Hayden. I thought I'd ate something bad. I gave birth in an alley. I was so confused and I didn't know what else to do with her. I figured if I came here with her I'd get arrested and I didn't want to do more time, so I just left her with the first person I saw."

Do more time? So she had been in jail at least once before.

I can't make her words paint a picture in my head. How could she not know she was pregnant? How could she go into labor and have a whole ass baby and not know what was happening?

Drugs.

They said she was on a ton of them.

Part of me wants to believe her. To believe she didn't know she was pregnant while she was getting high. I'd like to think she's a better person than that, but I don't know her at all.

"I left her there and just tried to leave." She goes on. "I tried to get out of town, but I guess I started hemorrhaging? I passed out and woke up here. I gave them your name but I didn't have your number."

"That's because you never bothered to reach out after you left." I say cooly.

She blinks her eyes open a little to look at me, her eyes flat and blank, holding no emotions. "You would have told them where I was."

"Of course."

"I didn't want to go home, Hayden, or back to rehab or back to that institution. They'd have had me put away for good this time. You know that."

"But wouldn't that have still been a better option than this?" I point out. "Better than being wherever the hell you've been all of this time?"

"No." She says quickly, without even having to think about it. "I wanted to be able to do what I wanted to do."

"Like drugs?" I snap, my anger at her bubbling to the surface after all this time I've stamped it down.

"Yeah." She says, her skeletal hand gripping her pillow under her head. "Not the ones they wanted me on, but the ones I like."

"I hate you so much." I say, my eyes welling with tears. "You could have chosen to get better but you wanted this instead."

"Yeah." She says again, her eyes falling shut. "I wanted to be me."

"This is the you you wanted to be?" I laugh sardonically. "Look at where you are! Look at what you did!"

"You don't understand." She tells me dryly. "You don't hear them like I do. They never stop, Hayden. They never stop...."

Her mouth stays open but I can tell she's fading out.

"You could have gotten better." I continue to argue even when I'm not sure she can hear me anymore. "Lots of people have your diagnosis and find the right medicine for them and live totally normal lives. They don't have babies in alleys and abandon them and their families."

"I'm...sorry you feel that way."

Not sorry that she did it. Not sorry that this is what her life has become. But sorry I don't understand. Maybe I don't, but that doesn't negate everything she's done.

"You don't even care, do you?"

I came all this way to see her, and I guess in my head I thought it would go different, but of course not. She's not normal. She's not the Alice I grew up with. She's the Alice she turned herself into.

She made the choices that got her here and she doesn't even care.

"I'm glad you came." She tells me again, a tiny smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

This is pointless.

She's drugged down out of her mind.

Exactly the way she likes to be.

I bet she'd tell me she's happy right now, even though she looks like a corpse barely hanging onto the soul inside of it.

"Tell me where she went." I demand.

"Who?" She licks her lips lazily.

I want to slap her.

"Your baby!" I snap, standing out of the chair and looking away because I can't stand to watch her any longer.

She swallows a few times, her dry throat working to produce words.

"She's with the father."

"And where is he?" I ask. "Is he one of your drug buddies? Some dude you met on the street?"

"He's a good guy." She says but I don't believe her. I don't trust her judgment on this. "He will take care of her."

"I don't know that!" I yell. "Neither do you! I'm shocked you even know who the father was!"

"That's not fair." She says. "You don't know me."

"Who's fault is that?" I turn back to her, seething.

"Hayden." She sighs. "She's fine, I swear. It's all fine now."

How can she be so sure? So unbothered? How does she not worry about her own kid?

But then I realize, she doesn't seem bothered because she isn't. She doesn't have a maternal connection to her baby. It was just a thing that happened to her. Just another Tuesday night for her.

"Alice, just tell me where he lives." I say. "You might not care, but I do. I need to see for myself that she's ok."

"West Lane Estates." She says. "Apartment C-32."

"Thank you." I snap.

"Are you going home after you check on her?"

I stare at her, her dazed eyes looking back at me. "Yes." I say firmly.

"You won't come back here?"

"Why would I?" I ask her.

"Because I'm your sister."

"Since when have you cared about that?" I raise an eyebrow. "Your excuses for not reaching out are tired, Alice. They've been dead for years and you haven't bothered."

She furrows her brows.

"What?" She asks and my anger falters as I see her face twist.

She didn't know.

I guess a part of me always assumed, or at least liked the idea that she kept up with us. That she'd known about where we were and cared to have information on her own family.

But I guess I forgot I was thinking about nice Alice. The one who was a good sister and daughter. Not this Alice.

"They died in a car accident while we were on vacation like seven or eight years ago."

She nods her head once, processing the apparently new information.

"That sucks."

That sucks? Seriously?

Our parents are dead and all she can muster up is that sucks?

I can't be here anymore.

I head quickly for the door, feeling like I'm running away from her even though she can't even chase me if she wanted to.

I yank it open and step out into the hallway before I turn back to look at her.

"What's her name?" I ask and Alice sighs. "Of course." I snap, slamming the door shit and grabbing my bag.

She didn't even bother naming her own baby.

I don't know why I ever came here to see her. Any good memory I had of my sister is now erased and replaced with that ghost of a heartless person laying in that bed.

I lug my bag behind me, the wheels screeching loudly across the floors until I'm out of the hospital and can breathe in the humid rainy air.

I order an Uber on my phone and sit on one of the benches outside of the hospital until it comes.

I'm going to check on this baby and make sure this guy is legit and then I'm getting the first flight back home and never thinking of this place or my sister ever again.

I get into the back of the minivan that comes for me and this time when the driver asks if I want music I give a resounding no.

I don't want music right now.

I just want to go home.

I want to sit on my couch with Gabby and Ella and talk about wedding planning and watch crappy reality tv until the memory of all of this goes away.

I just want to be with my friends. The people who actually care about me. I want to let them hug me and tell me I did the right thing and that everything will be ok in the end.

I sit in the backseat scrolling through pictures on my phone of them. Wishing more than anything that I hadn't been so stubborn about doing this alone.

My heart hammers in my chest and I'm holding back the tears that want to fall. I don't want to fall apart alone. I don't want to let this awful feeling drag me down right now.

I want my support system there when I let it happen. I just need to get back to my own life and the things that make me happy.

No more long lost sisters and their callous unnerving cruelty to shake at my bones, trying to break into my chest to rip out my heart.

The Uber turns off a side street and loops down a road before making a right into an apartment complex.

We pull around to the back to a few sets of townhomes nestled at the end of the road.

The man turns the car around so that he will be able to get back out and let's me know that we've arrived.

I stare out the window up at the white and brick buildings, their tiny front porches feet from the ones on the other sides of them.

Some have little plants handing, others have wreaths on the doors, a couple have strung up lights, but the one in front of me is blank.

Just a dark porch with the light out.

I get out of the vehicle and yank my bag out behind me and I walk slowly up to the small porch.

The Uber drives away behind me and I look down at the stoop and see two empty cases of beer sitting beside the door.

I can hear a baby crying from inside and my heart hurts.

I bang my fist on the door and wait, hearing movement from inside.

The wailing baby gets louder and I can feel my anxiety creeping higher and higher as I stand here waiting.

I knock again.

"Just a second!" A man yells back from inside. "I'm coming!"

The door flings open and I open my mouth to start yelling, but when I see him my words dry up in my throat.

"You." I choke.

He looks different but somehow exactly the same. His dark curls fall into his big brown eyes as he stares at me.

"Can I help you?" He asks, turning to look over his shoulder where the screaming continues.

He doesn't remember.

I'm not shocked.

Honestly, why would he?

He was drunk out of his mind the day we met.

Plus, that day doesn't hold anywhere near the significance for him as it does for me. He doesn't even know that it's because of him that I'm even standing here right now.

Everything goes fuzzy in front of me.

He doesn't even know who I am.

But I do.

The fact that I'd spent so long obsessing over finding him, and now here he is...

And he's the father of my sister's child.