Security escorted my sister out of the ballroom a few minutes later, after she lunged for my phone and tried to smash it on the marble.

I have thought a great deal about her last words to me — I never asked you to save me — because they were designed to wound, and they did wound, and yet the more I have turned them over, the more I have found in them a strange and unintended gift.

Because she was right.

She never did ask.

And for years I had held my rescue over the whole family like a silent debt, a thing they owed me, the great sacrifice that entitled me to their gratitude and their protection and their love.

And the fact that they never paid that debt was, for twelve years, the central grievance of my life.