I have two older brothers. Lately our family has been working through something hard, the kind of thing with real decisions attached and real costs.

For a while, all of it was happening in pieces. One brother would text me. The other would text me. Someone would call me, and then someone else would call me. I was the middle of every conversation, and none of us were ever in the same one.

Somewhere in all of that, things started to tighten. Nobody said anything cruel. But a text doesn't have a tone of voice, so you supply one yourself. And when you're tired and worried, the tone you supply is usually the worst one.

Then my brother said it plainly: we have to get on a call and clear this up. We're all we have left. We are not going to ruin this.

So we did. The three of us in front of our computers, in three different places, finally in one conversation.

I went in hopeful, and a little braced.

What surprised me was how quickly it changed. There were no harsh words. Things that had seemed like disagreements turned out to be confusion. Things that were hard stayed hard, but we talked about them anyway, out loud, looking at each other. We even talked about where this might end.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, we laughed. We commiserated. We were brothers and a sister again, not three people trading messages.

Every so often Jaycee wandered into view on my screen, like she wanted to check who I was talking to.

At the end, before we hung up, we said I love you.

I keep thinking about how close we came to letting the texts decide what we thought of each other. Not because anyone meant harm. Just because it's easy, when you can't see someone's face, to forget who they are to you.

Nothing is finished yet. But we're on the same side of it again.

Jane & Jaycee 🐾

P.S. Next Sunday's letter is one I've been working up to for a while. It's about a morning three years ago that changed everything. I'll see you then.