The surgeon arrived within the hour and explained that Dominic’s appendix had not ruptured, but it was close, and they needed to operate that night. Dominic, who had argued with me across a dinner table only two hours earlier, now gripped my sleeve like he had when we were kids. “Stay,” he said, all the sarcasm gone from his voice. “Don’t leave until they take me back.” I told him I would be right there when he woke up. And for the first time in years, my brother did not have a single joke about administration or hospital sales.

While Dad paced the waiting room and Priya raced toward her own mother’s hospital three hours away, I sat beside my brother’s gurney and did the thing my family had spent a decade calling a waste of my brain. I explained the procedure in words that calmed him. I told him what the anesthesia would feel like, what recovery would be like, why the pain had moved from the middle of his abdomen to the lower right. He listened to every word. When they wheeled him toward the operating room, he looked back at me, pale and frightened, and said something I never expected to hear at that table or any table.