Every time I made an excuse, I confirmed her belief that she was never the problem.

I had thought I was helping my sister.

I had been, in fact, one of the main forces enabling her to remain the person she was, insulating her from the accountability that was the only thing that might ever have prompted her to change.

And so when the fire finally came, the fire she had built herself over years of theft and lies, I made a decision that felt like cruelty and was actually the opposite: I did not put it out.

I let her feel the heat of her own choices, fully, for the first time in her life, because I had finally understood that a person who is always rescued never has any reason to stop needing rescue, and that the most genuinely loving thing I could do, for a sister determined to keep relighting the same fire, was to stop rushing in to save her from it.