When my mother’s retail hours were cut, I paid her health-insurance premiums.

When Tate married Sela, I paid the deposit on their suburban rental, because they reminded everyone, constantly, how expensive triplets would be.

They called it helping out. I called it keeping them alive.

And to manage it, years earlier, I had opened a joint emergency account and credit line with my parents — strictly, by an ironclad rule, for medical emergencies and genuine disasters.

I understand now the role I had been assigned, though it took me most of a decade to see it, because you cannot see the shape of a thing you are standing inside.

Every family like mine has a scapegoat and a golden child, and I had been cast as the first the day Tate was born the second.