They had entirely forgotten, or never understood, that somewhere along the way the soft, silent twin had quietly become one of the most dangerous things a family with secrets can produce: a lawyer who knew precisely where the bodies were buried, and precisely how to dig them up, and who had, at last, been given a reason to.

That phrase they used for me — good with paperwork — has stayed with me, because it is a small masterpiece of the particular way families like mine diminish the ones they have chosen to keep small.

They did not lie about me, exactly.

I was, technically, good with paperwork.

But the phrase was engineered to take a real and formidable competence and shrink it into something clerical and unthreatening, to make my profession sound like tidiness rather than power.

It is a thing done to scapegoats constantly, and it is worth naming so that other people can recognize it: the reframing of your strengths into something smaller.