Victoria didn’t deny it. She couldn’t; the evidence was in Harrison’s folder, pharmacy logs and decrypted messages between my sister and a lab technician who had lost his license, all of it laid out in order.

What she did instead was laugh — a low, cracked, terrible sound that curdled into a snarl.

“So what?” She spat it into the sterile quiet, and the mask was all the way off now.

“So what if I did? You were always the favorite! The sweet, perfect little nurse. Dad handed you everything, and you didn’t even want the name, you didn’t care about any of it! You didn’t deserve Oakridge. I earned it. I did what I had to do!”

There it was, finally, the thing underneath twelve years. Not guilt. Not even the pretense of it.

In front of our parents, in front of the police, with her whole life collapsing around her heels, my sister’s one grievance was that I had been loved without having to earn it — and that I’d had the gall not to fight her for a prize she’d bled everyone around her to win.