I want you to understand how that choice looked to a terrified teenager who had just been taught, in the most literal way possible, what it cost to save her sister.

It looked like love.

It looked like the same choice I had already made once, running into that fire: her life or my comfort, her future or my truth.

And I made the same choice I had made in the fire, because it was the only choice I knew how to make, because I had been raised to make it, because the whole machinery of my family existed to make that choice feel like the only decent option available to a good person.

I do not blame that girl.