I should say too, because it matters to everything that came after, that I was never the favored one growing up.

That role belonged to Chloe, who was prettier and louder and easier to show off, and to whatever performance my parents needed at a given moment.

I was the quiet one, the watchful one, the one at the edge of the photographs, and in my family being quiet was read as being lesser — as if a person who did not demand the room could not possibly deserve much of it.

Only my grandfather ever saw it differently.

He was quiet too, after all, and he recognized in me, I think, a fellow member of a small club: the people who watch.

“You don’t miss much, do you,” he said to me once, when I was maybe fourteen, after I’d noticed something at a family dinner that everyone else had talked right over.