This was the place you come to on the far side of it, where something in you that has been trying and trying for a lifetime finally, quietly, stops trying.

I need to explain what that text did, because on its face it was almost nothing — a single distracted line about my sister’s hurt feelings — and yet it was the most clarifying sentence anyone in my family ever sent me.

All my life I had been performing a quiet, exhausting labor without ever naming it: the labor of believing my parents loved me in some deep way that just didn’t always show, that was there underneath the coldness, the favoritism, the way Serena’s smallest wish had always outweighed my largest need.

I had spent thirty years explaining them to myself. They’re not good at feelings.