But I have kept the message.

I don’t reread it, and I feel nothing much toward Suzanne one way or the other anymore, which is its own kind of freedom.

I kept it because of one line — I see now that we treated Sophia and Lucia as though they counted for less, only because they were girls — a sentence I had known to be true for a decade and had never once heard any of them say.

For years I had wondered whether I was imagining it, whether I was the oversensitive one, whether the flowers-for-the-heir and the jokes-that-weren’t-jokes were really the pattern I believed them to be or just a sad woman’s paranoia.