One child had been told the other could not help, and so had stepped in to cover the gaps.

The other child, me, had gone on covering those same gaps from a distance, faithfully, invisibly, her money absorbed into the household and her name quietly lifted off the credit for it.

And our parents had sat in the middle, receiving from both of us, letting each believe they were carrying a weight the other had set down.

It was not even greed, exactly, or not only greed.

It was something more organizational than greed, the management of two children as two separate accounts, each kept unaware of the other, each billed in a different currency, so that the total taken could be greater than either of us would ever have paid if we had once been allowed to compare our statements.