She grabbed her designer purse off the back of her chair, and she tripped over her own high heels in her scramble toward the front door, and she ran out into the night, slamming the door behind her so hard that the mirror in our entryway rattled on its hook.

And then she was gone, and the house was quiet, and we all sat for a moment in the silence she left behind, a silence that should have felt like the aftermath of a catastrophe but instead, strangely, felt like relief, like clean air rushing into a room that had been closed up too long.

My sister had been poisoning our family for longer than any of us had realized, and in the space of a single sentence from a ten-year-old, she had been exposed and expelled, and the poison had gone out the door with her.

I had spent years managing Gwen, accommodating her, making excuses for her moods and her selfishness and her endless need to be the center of everything.