In my family, we are your family had never meant we love you and will protect you. It had meant you belong to us, and what belongs to us can be used. It was the sentence that had justified thirty years of taking — my money, my labor, my silence, and now my name and my life’s work — always with the same logic, that family could ask anything of you and you were monstrous to refuse.

Calla was invoking it now to ask me to bless a felony that would liquidate my company and betray thousands of patients, and she genuinely could not see why I might decline, because in the arithmetic she had been raised in, my refusal to be robbed was the real betrayal. We are your family. Yes, I thought, looking at the signature I never made.

That was exactly the problem.

For thirty-six years, being their family had meant being available to be used, and I was, in the space of a single word spoken into a phone in a service corridor, resigning the position.

Not the daughter.

Not the sister.