My parents understood the world as a series of rooms you were either invited into or shut out of, and the currency for entry was the appearance of success — the right coat, the right husband, the right brownstone, the right small talk about the right people.

Calla had that currency in abundance, and so Calla was displayed, brought out at every gathering like a piece of good silver.

I had a different kind of worth, the kind that does not shine at a dinner party: I could actually build things.

But building things happens in unglamorous places — in garages, in rented workshops, in the years of failure before the success — and my parents could not display a garage.

They could not introduce a daughter who smelled of solder and slept under her desk.

So they did the thing that families like mine do to the child who produces value they cannot show off: they used me and hid me at the same time.

When they needed money, I was family.

When they needed to look good, I was busy with my little computer project.

I had been, for my entire adult life, the engine they kept in the basement and the daughter they kept out of the photographs, and I had told myself, for years, that this was just my personality not suiting theirs — that if I tried a little harder, softened a little more, I might one day be brought upstairs into the light.

Sitting in that suite in a suit worth more than their mortgage, I finally understood that the basement was not a waiting room.

It was the whole of the place they had for me.

And I was done waiting to be let upstairs.

Chapter 3 — The Top Floor

I was not in my cramped apartment wearing the old gray sweatshirt my mother, Thessaly, once called “proof she’d given up.”