I have carried Sienna’s confession with me ever since, because it named something I had not fully understood about the family until she said it out loud.

I had thought of Sienna, for two years, as a straightforwardly cruel person — spoiled, mean, entitled.

And she was those things.

But standing in that living room, listening to her describe the friend at seventeen, the thing she’d been told and had talked herself out of believing, I understood that her cruelty was not the source of anything.

It was a symptom.

Sienna had been raised inside the same machine that had tried to grind me down, except she had been raised inside it, from birth, as a participant — taught before she could even understand what she was being taught that the family’s image was sacred, that uncomfortable truths were to be smoothed over, that the correct response to a friend saying something frightening about your father was to decide the friend was mistaken.