I remember being faintly annoyed that I was doing the dishes while Victoria got to sit and be spoken to like an heir.

I did not think it meant anything. That was the whole tragedy of it: to me it was a drunk man talking, and to my sister, four feet away in that armchair, it was the founding document of the next twelve years.

I remember exactly what my father said, because I would hear it one more time in my life — twelve and a half years later, on the last night of my old existence.

“You know what really makes a family, Victoria?” He said it slowly, in that soft, self-satisfied cadence the men in my family fall into when they think they’re saying something wise.

“Endurance. That’s what your grandfather always said. Whichever one of you two girls can hold her family together the longest — that’s who gets this house. All of it. Oakridge. That’s how you earn a legacy. That’s how you prove you didn’t just get born into a name, but that you deserve to carry it.”

I remember thinking, at the sink, that it was a sad, drunken, grandiose thing to say, and that he’d forget it by morning.