In the twelve years after, faced with the same secret, one of us chose to protect the family at the cost of herself, and one of us chose to protect herself at the cost of everyone.

That is the thing our sameness proves, and it is why I no longer accept, from anyone, the excuse that people are simply what their circumstances made them.

Jessica and I were the same circumstances.

We were, quite literally, the same genes.

And we became a woman who runs into fires and a woman who starts them, purely through the accumulated weight of the small choices we each kept making, day after day, year after year, until the choices hardened into character and the character into fate.

I find that thought frightening and also freeing.