People have asked me, since, whether it was hard to sit in that courtroom and watch my own sister sentenced, whether some part of me grieved for her, for the family we had once been.

And the honest answer is that I did grieve, but not for the woman in the defendant’s chair.

I grieved for the sister I had thought I had, somewhere back in childhood, before whatever went wrong in her went wrong.

I grieved for the idea of a sister.

But the actual woman, the one who had wagered our mother’s home at a poker table and then drugged our mother into silence so that the theft could go undisturbed, that woman I did not grieve for at all, because she had made her choices freely, in full knowledge of who they would hurt, and the person they hurt most was lying unconscious in a basement while my sister wore her jewelry upstairs.

There is a limit past which a person forfeits the claim of family.