I would have frozen on those stairs and not been able to move.

I might, God help me, have turned around and walked back out of my own graduation, my face burning, apologizing to no one for a crime I did not commit.

That is who I had been, for twenty-two years.

It is worth understanding who I had been, to understand what it meant that I kept walking.

For as long as I could remember, Stephanie had been the golden child.

Beautiful, charismatic, effortless, endlessly praised — the daughter our parents held up to the neighbors, the one whose photographs filled the good frames on the mantel.