But some part of me had still believed, right up until his fist was already moving, that my brother would not actually strike me at our father’s funeral, in a church, in front of everyone we had ever known.

That was my last piece of the old family story, the one where Leon was reckless and greedy and cruel but not that, never quite that.

He knocked it out of me along with the rest.

And the strange thing — the thing I would turn over for a long time afterward — was how quickly the shock burned off and left something almost like relief in its place.

Because for my whole life the family had insisted on seeing Leon as he wished to be seen, and me as the difficult one who couldn’t get along with him, and now, in a single unmistakable second in front of two hundred witnesses, he had shown all of them exactly what I had been living beside for years.

He thought he was silencing me.