My arm looks fat.” “Move over, Maya.

You’re blocking the light.” “No, no.

Do it again.

That isn’t my good side.”

It was, I would only later understand, its own kind of tell, my sister’s obsession with the photographs.

At the time I read it as ordinary vanity, the tiresome self-absorption of a woman who could not enjoy a sunset without documenting herself in front of it.

But there was something more frantic in it than simple vanity, a desperation I did not yet recognize, the compulsive need of a person curating a version of her life for an audience because the actual life underneath had become something she could not bear to look at directly.