I looked at my daughter that afternoon, glowing in the warm light, a framed portrait of her own unhidden self in her hands, bound for a gallery wall.

And I looked at my son, eleven years old, already reaching for his next shot, the quiet watchful boy who had, without ever quite meaning to, changed the entire course of our family’s life.

And I thought about how it had all turned, in the end, on a camera, and about what my son had actually taught us, all of us, over that year and a half.

Because my sister had spent her whole life pointing her lens at the wrong things: at her own arm, her own angles, her own carefully staged perfection, curating a false and flawless image to hide a life she could not bear to look at honestly.