Dear Martha,

What the hell were you thinking?

Honestly, the letter sounded about right just with that. It summed up her reaction, her family's reaction, the hospitals reaction, all in about six words. Hardly letter quality, but then what else did she really have to say?

I'm so glad you've finally made a life-long friend Martha, now come home so I can kill you.

That might be just a bit too confrontational. It was true that at the moment she really did want to kill her sister, but it was also true that that was not how you start a letter. Let's try again.

The next time you take off with a complete stranger to go travel the world with for a whole month, could you please at least give us a phone call?

Now that sounded too nice. She remembered reading her sister's semi-delusional e-mail a few days ago, "Tell Mum I'm sorry," she had said. Yeah, that had been a great conversation.

So nice to hear from you, did I mention Mum's as mad as hell?

And it wasn't just their mum, either. Their father hadn't been particularly thrilled to hear that his oldest daughter had just randomly decided to swan off with some mystery man from the hospital with no word or call for a month. The yelling had given her bad flashbacks to when the girls were still in school…and both living at home.

You'd better have a good excuse for leaving.

This was what she really wanted answered. "He was a traveler Tish," she had said, "And he invited me to go with him." Yeah, but why? Over the years, Martha had been invited to all sorts of different things, medical conventions, internships in other countries, a year of backpacking with Bobby Simmons (very fit, she should have gone) Never once had she agreed. Not until now.

Why this man?

There had to be, Tish realized, something very, very different about the man her sister had gone off with. It was true that Martha had never really had many friends, had always had her nose to the grindstone and had never really been very happy with the world around her. She looked at the last sentence of her sister's letter, "Hope you're having as brilliant a time as I am," and finally knew what to write.

Dear Martha,

What the hell were you thinking? Swanning off with a strange man and completely abandoning your job and your family like that! What was going through your head? Because whatever it was, I'm proud of it.

Looking back Martha, you definitely needed a friend. You always had me, that's for sure, and Leo, but siblings and friends are really quite different, you can never substitute one for the other. It's fantastic to see you finally finding someone Martha, and while I'm only a bit disappointed it's not a boyfriend, at least you found someone to talk to.

There is, however, the whole matter of you swanning off with this great friend to travel around the world. I'm a fair bit angry with you for not calling, and I promise you I'll get over it as long as you do one, simple thing: Come home. I refuse to be completely comfortable with this, until I meet this friend of yours. I know you don't technically need me to be completely accepting, you're an adult, you can do what you want, but I'm just saying. No meeting, no acceptance. That's it.

I am, however, as I said before, glad you found someone. You should probably work on your French a bit too, we both know you're hopeless at it.

Until next time,

Love,

Tish