Chapter 1 — A Family of Seven

When I married Derek, I knew his family was large, and for a while I counted that as part of the luck of him.

Seven siblings, more nieces and nephews than I could keep straight without a diagram, and a calendar so thick with birthdays and anniversaries and this-or-that dinners that some weekend or other was always being claimed for one of them.

I had grown up in a small, quiet house, the only child of parents who treated a restaurant as a once-a-year occasion, and the sheer noisy abundance of the people Derek belonged to felt, in the beginning, like being handed a second family I had never thought to ask for.

I wanted to be part of it.

I threw myself at being part of it, the way you do when you are new and grateful and a little afraid that the warmth might be withdrawn if you are not useful enough to keep it.

I did not have the words for that suspicion in the early years, so I filed it where I filed everything inconvenient, in the drawer marked later, and I kept showing up with my purse and my patience and my willingness to be the reliable one.

My name is Sarah.

I am a financial analyst, which is a detail that matters to this story in two directions at once, because it means I am good with numbers and it means I earn more than most of the people I am about to describe, and both of those facts were quietly weaponized against me before I understood that a weapon was being made.

I am the kind of person who notices patterns for a living, who can look at a column of figures and feel, before I can prove it, when something in them does not sit right.

It is a strange thing to be professionally alert to a discrepancy and personally blind to one for two full years.

But a ledger on a screen is an easy thing to read coldly.

A family is not, especially when you have decided, in advance, that you are going to love them.

That decision is a generous one and I do not regret making it, but a decision to love people in advance is also a decision to overlook things in advance, and the two turn out to be the same muscle used in two directions.

So I will not pretend I was tricked all at once, or that there was a single villain who did a single clear bad thing.

That is not how it happened, and it is not how these things ever happen.

It happened the way water shapes a stone, by the patient repetition of something small, a dinner here and a dinner there, each one easy to pay for and easy to excuse, until the shape of the arrangement had been carved so deep that no one in the family could any longer see it as an arrangement at all.

They simply saw me, and the chair I sat in, and the particular use they had all quietly agreed I was for.