Everything was arranged around that appearance.

My successes were threats to it, because they disturbed the story of Stephanie’s supremacy; my silence was essential to it, because the truth would have spoiled the picture.

And in the end, the perfect appearance they had sacrificed me to protect was not destroyed by me, or by my success, or by any bitterness of mine.

It was undone by the very cruelty they had cultivated in their golden child, the cruelty they had spent a lifetime excusing and enabling and calling something else.

They had fed the monster in Stephanie for twenty-two years to preserve the facade, and in the end it was the monster that ate the facade.

I did not have to lift a finger.