I had kept telling myself that the coldness was just their way, that the favoritism was old habit, that underneath it all we were still, somehow, a family.

The envelope asked a question I had spent my whole life refusing to answer honestly.

Christmas morning answered it for me.

Standing in the snow with my own suitcase in my arms, watching my father brush the frost off his collar and turn back into the warm house without me, I understood that my family had, at last, and unmistakably, shown me who they were.

As I dragged the suitcase toward my dented old Honda, the front door opened one more time.

“Oh, Fiona,” Savannah called out, sweetly, and when I turned she was lifting my father’s crystal champagne glass high into the frozen air.