She had absorbed the worst truth a person can absorb about their own parents, and her first instinct had been to shield me from it.

That is who my sister was.

The world had spent her whole life telling her, in a thousand cruel and casual ways, that she was less, that she could not understand complicated things, that she needed to be managed and spoken for.

And here she was, having understood a betrayal more complex and more painful than most people ever face, and having chosen, out of pure love, to carry it silently for years so that her sister would not be hurt by it.

There was nothing less about my sister.