He had logged a minor medical procedure I’d had at twelve.

He had logged summer camp.

And then, near the back, I found the section with my sister’s name, and I understood the whole architecture of my life in a single turn of a page.

Lucienne: dance academy — investment. Lucienne: Europe — cultural enrichment. Lucienne: first car — gift.

Not one entry under Lucienne’s name was a debt.

Not one.

My whole life I had believed my parents’ favoritism was an emotional thing — a warmth I’d been shorted, a wound without edges.

I was holding the edges now, in black ink.

It had been a policy.

A written, itemized, decades-long policy.