I took out my phone — cracked now, from the fall — and I sent two words to the one contact I had protected, guarded, and hidden from the Sterling family for three years. Come now. My family had spent my whole life calling me lonely.

Tonight, they were going to meet my husband.

Chapter 5 — The Role

While I waited, I thought about the thirty-two years, because it is important, to understand this story, to understand what those years had actually been.

I was not, whatever my family believed, a sad or a lonely or a failed person.

But I had been cast, before I could speak, as the family’s designated disappointment, and a role like that, played long enough, becomes a kind of prison whether or not it is true.

In the Sterling family, everything was a comparison, and I was always the losing side of it.