It’s Sunday morning and you are back, sitting across from me at the kitchen table. The nanny has prepared a bowl of cereal for each of us, and although I am starving, I don’t eat. It doesn’t seem appropriate.

Instead I stare at you. Your tattered clothes. Your hair, streaked with mud. The frozen sweat clinging to your brow. You stare back, but I know you aren’t actually looking at me. Your thoughts are elsewhere, miles away. Like seeds, brief and unburnished, flung onto fresh soil.

“What’s your deal lately? Locking yourself in your room, ignoring me? Why did you run away last night?” I long to ask you these questions. But even when I start through gritted teeth, the words disappear before they can reach my lips. My voice breaks. The cereal coagulates. I have never been the bold one.

Instead I hug you, pull you in tight. But you are cold and dry, and I am thinking that the soil across your face makes you look unfamiliar. Tell me what’s going on.

Our mother is still outside arguing with the policemen who found you barefoot in a T-shirt and pajamas. I want to match her hysteria. Maybe then you would tell me everything, explain to me how every second in our Georgian-styled house feels suffocating. How most things feel like suffocating these days. You would press your face against the marble tabletop and tangle your fingers in your hair and talk about how our father leaves for months at a time on overseas business trips and how our mother’s been slowly unraveling after quitting grad school.

You would tell me how you can’t stand the fighting, the long stretches of silence or how he sleeps on the couch. You would tell me how you despise the way she wanders from room to room, searching for something to busy herself with. You would talk with me like you did when we were young, nestled in the backyard on those untouched, ochre evenings, coarse and rugged and real.

But I am not as strong as I used to be, and so I will never know why you ran away last night. Why you launched yourself into the swift January darkness, letting it burn your lungs and rush into your head. The way the crisp air, raw and naked, consummated you. How the stars traced your exodus into the night.

The cereal is soggy now. A layer of milk skin has formed. I can hear the police car back out of the driveway.

“Mom’s going to yell at you again,” I say. My voice is angry, small. Perhaps, privately, you want me to hold you, to hold you while you shatter for the second time this week on the kitchen floor – you, the brother whom I love.

But I can’t do it. Not anymore. The front door opens and the wintry air swirls in, curling, twisting, disappearing into nothingness. It stills for a moment, and I know it is carrying the unspeakable truth away.