In that one detail, before I had seen anything else, I understood the depth of what I was dealing with.

A person who would wear those, in that house, on that day, was a person who had severed something inside herself that most people never sever.

“Jessica?” she chirped, arranging her face into a bright, professional landlord’s smile, a smile I had never once seen her direct at family.

“Come on in.

I own the place.” I own the place.

Behind the sunglasses, I kept my face perfectly still, and I stepped across the threshold of the house I owned, past the sister who had just claimed it, wearing our dead father’s gifts to our mother as if they were costume jewelry she had picked up at a market stall.