What she’d actually found was a role in my sister’s production, and she’d been cast for it precisely because she was too desperate to ask questions.

That didn’t make what she did to me hurt less. But it did mean that she and I had, in a way neither of us chose, been standing on the same stage the whole time, reading lines a third person wrote.

She financed their weekend trips. She had, according to a folder I could barely make myself read, paid off a clerk at the clinic so that Cassie’s pregnancy result reached Julian directly, at the right dramatic moment — while making certain I was the last to know anything.

And her masterstroke, the thing that took the most years and did the most damage, was the story she told our parents.

For three years, quietly, she fed my mother a single steady narrative: Elise is unstable.

Elise is pushing Julian away.