Same night.

Same family.

Two completely different people.

Jessica looked at me then, really looked, and I watched her understand, at last, what she had done when she reached for my robe.

She had not dragged a helpless sister onto a stage for the crowd to laugh at.

She had, with her own two hands, in front of one hundred and eighty-seven witnesses, handed a fraud attorney the one thing she had spent twelve years making sure I would never have: an audience, and a reason.

I keep returning, in my mind, to that fact of our sameness, because it is the strangest and most instructive thing about the whole story: that Jessica and I began at the exact same place.