I wanted to prove the game was a lie.

And a low-income family, moving into a home built by the company that was once an engine of one man’s vanity, is the proof — the living refutation of everything Arthur Sterling believed about how a person becomes large.

Chapter 18 — The Role, Undone

For thirty-two years, my family had treated me as a convenience, a punchline, and a shadow whose whole function was to make someone else shine.

And I want to say something honest about how a person survives that, and comes out the other side of it whole, because I did not do it the way the stories usually say.