Chapter 13 — The Preemptive Strike

The next morning, the fallout began, and my sister, predictably, tried to get ahead of it.

Before sunrise, Gwen called our mother, crying hysterically, and told her a completely inverted version of the evening: that David and I had attacked her at dinner, accused her of absurd and baseless lies, and deliberately turned the children against her.

It was a preemptive strike, an attempt to control the story before the truth could reach anyone, and it was, I would come to understand, exactly the kind of thing Gwen had been doing her whole life, rewriting reality in her own favor and getting there first.

And so my mother called me at seven o’clock in the morning, practically breathless with indignation.