I told her I wished her well, and I hung up.

I have kept that sentence, the way you keep a stone that cut you. I didn’t want to lose my spot. It explained my entire childhood in nine words, and it explained Calla, and in a strange way it even explained our parents, because it named the thing that ran the whole family: the terror of losing your spot in the window.

My mother had traced my signature not out of malice, exactly, but out of that same terror — the fear of falling out of the display, of becoming the kind of people whose calls went unreturned.

Calla had gone into a medical file and photographed my name for the same reason, dressed up as helping.

They were all of them so frightened of the shadows that they would do anything, betray anyone, to stay in the light of other people’s approval — and they could not see that the light they were so desperate to stay inside was not warmth at all but only exposure, a spotlight on a stage where you had to keep performing or be cast out.

I had been cast out young.