It was the honest word, in the end — the one true thing my brother said to me that whole terrible day — because it named exactly what had happened, only from the wrong side.

Priorities.

Of course.

I had simply never understood, until I read it on a screen in a church vestibule an hour before my wedding, where I fell on my family’s list of them.

I had spent thirty years assuming I was near the top — the dependable daughter, the one they could always count on — and it had never once occurred to me that being the one they could always count on is not the same as being the one they love, and can in fact be its opposite, because the person you count on is the person whose own needs you have learned to ignore.

You do not have to consider the priorities of the person who will show up regardless.