You don’t know anything about us!” — and the woman only lifted her phone, which had been recording the entire spectacle, and said, “I know enough.”

And my father put his face in his hands.

Not, I understood, out of any remorse for what they had done to me.

He was cowering from something else entirely — from the sudden, total, public collapse of the artificial perfection he had spent decades curating for the neighbors, the picture-perfect family that he had built my silence into the foundation of, coming down now in front of everyone whose opinion he had spent his whole life chasing.

Chapter 13 — I Just Wanted to Survive You

Dean Harrow set the papers down on the podium and looked directly at my sister.