“I told myself the money you earned was mine because I’d raised you. Then I decided Tara deserved more because she was younger. And when Della got sick, I was afraid to spend what I thought was mine — so each bad choice was easier than the last.”

I didn’t embrace her. I didn’t raise my voice. “Admitting your greed doesn’t undo the harm.”

“I know,” she whispered. “Do you think she could ever forgive me?”

“That’s hers to decide, not mine.”

Della agreed to read a letter my mother sent, though she wouldn’t meet her in person. In it, my mother asked for nothing — no money, no property — and for the first time named Della’s cancer without calling it a lie.

Tara took far longer. She insisted for months that she was the real victim, until she ended up working beside a coworker who’d sold her own phone to buy her child’s medicine, and finally understood what it meant to mock a dying woman.