The grief of accepting that they had made me choose.

Chapter 6 — The Version Everyone Knew

Let me tell you the version of that night everyone in the room believed, because it is important to understand the lie before you understand the truth.

Twelve years earlier, when Jessica and I were seventeen, our family’s lake house had burned down, three weeks after Jessica crashed our father’s car while drunk.

In the version everyone knew, a heater had malfunctioned in the night.

Jessica had become trapped upstairs.