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and melted under pressure.
    But she wasn’t stupid, and she had talents that I lacked, which the traditional bent of our mom’s early parenting had neglected to nurture. She had always excelled in art class, but her gift for paint and pencil did not get the same attention as mine for letters and numbers. By high school our mom had become more affirming, and without a finger in her back, Iris bloomed. She developed a fascination with fashion and design, and while an interest in arts was not quite uncommon at our private high school, she was serious. She dressed with maturity and a strange, elusive style that ignored the norms of her classmates. As soon as I got my driver’s license, I ferried her to thrift shops and fabric stores. For her fourteenth birthday, our mom gave her a sewing machine. She started to wear makeup and perm and dye her hair, and while she never stopped being quiet, sweet-tempered, self-effacing Iris, she gained a little confidence to go with her burgeoning beauty.
    Despite our differences, we were as close as sisters could be. Growing up in a house with no father and a working mother, we had little entertainment outside ourselves. From childhood, we were best friends, and though we had the usual skirmishes, we were, on the whole, inseparable. We shared a bedroom for fifteen years, and we rarely spent less than an hour trading whispers between crawling under our covers and saying good night. She called me unni, the Korean word for older sister, though she spoke little Korean.
    We both took it hard when I left for Connecticut, but I was thrown into a dormitory and assailed with new situations and eager new faces. It was an adjustment for me, and it took time and effort that I couldn’t often spare for missing home. I talked to Iris several times a week, and in the beginning she cried during most of our phone calls. I felt guilty sometimes for the lack of tears on my end, but she knew I missed her—I had never been the expressive sister.
    When I went home for Christmas, she was glowing with joy, and as I was happy to be home, I credited our reunion. I wasn’t wrong, but I was less than half right.
    Over the next few months, we talked once or twice a week. I was, for the first time, excited about a boy, and a lot of our time was devoted to discussing my blossoming relationship with Diego. In retrospect, I should have heard her silence on her love life. I must have presumed it was the result of her steady relationship with her recently acquired first boyfriend. She was a perpetual romantic, prone to crushes and analytical speculation, but she avoided the subject of her love life for months.
    In April, my mom asked me if I knew why Iris was depressed. I had never before been blindsided by my sister, and that first conversation with our mom did nothing to change my certainty that everything was okay. I told her she was imagining things, and I didn’t dwell on the possibility that Iris had been less than truthful with me.
    The next couple weeks tested my capacity for denial. Iris refused to get out of bed or go to school, and in early May I got a phone call.
    We had been talking about nothing, about food or school, when she said, in a voice calm as a frozen lake, “I think I’m pregnant.”
    I laughed. It was just past dinnertime in L.A. “How much did you eat?”
    â€œI haven’t been to the doctor yet, but I took three tests.”
    That my sister could be pregnant, and that I could have missed the loss of her virginity—these new facts unlocked a quadrant of the universe that I had never before encountered. I spent a lot of time reading about dramatic events and emotional turmoil, but I had avoided all the heartbreak that inspired the literature, and took a happy, peaceful life as my due.
    Sex was not a closed topic between Iris and me. We had spent hours discussing the mechanics and implications, spinning out situations, the who and where and how. I had