Lily was seventeen minutes older than Ethan. She never let him forget it. She called him her little brother with the exaggerated authority of a girl who understood that seventeen minutes was functionally meaningless but enjoyed the leverage anyway.
She was loud where Ethan was quiet. She was impulsive where he was careful. She entered rooms the way weather enters a valley, fully, without apology, altering the temperature of everything she touched.
She wanted to be a civil rights attorney. She told me this at fourteen, sitting at the kitchen table with a library book about Thurgood Marshall open in front of her, and she said it with the particular certainty of a teenager who has just discovered that the world is unjust and has decided to take it personally.
She joined the debate team because she told me arguing was a skill that deserved to be sharpened rather than punished. She joined the art club because she told me creativity and logic were not opposites. They were partners. She told me a lawyer who could not imagine a better world would only ever defend the one that already existed.
