“Thank you, Lucienne.”

“For what?”

“For reminding me why I never need to feel guilty about this.

Not for one second.”

Because that was the gift my sister kept giving me, all through those weeks, without ever meaning to: every time I wavered — and I did waver, guilt is a long habit and it does not break cleanly — she would say something that snapped me right back to certainty. Biscuit has a prescription diet. My son had sat twenty feet away with a dry roll, and my sister’s defense, offered in complete sincerity, was that her dog’s filet had been medically necessary.

There was no arguing with a person who could say that and mean it, and more importantly, there was no reconciling with one.

Some part of me had spent thirty years believing that if I could just explain it clearly enough, Lucienne would understand what she’d done and be sorry.

The prescription-diet defense ended that fantasy for good.

She was not going to understand.

She had constructed a world in which her comfort was a need and my son’s dignity was an extravagance, and she lived in that world completely, and no sentence I could say was going to relocate her.