The wrong was in the contrast, the deliberate gulf Beatrice engineered between what she gave them and what she gave my daughter, a gulf designed so that Chloe would sit there and measure it and understand precisely where she stood.

A moment later another cousin, Lucas, opened an identical one.

The older teenagers were handed crisp holiday cards, and pulled from them thick stacks of hundred-dollar bills, and the adults cheered, and the room filled up with torn wrapping paper and happy noise and the warm sounds of a generous grandmother being generous.

I sat and watched it all with a smile pinned to my face and a knot tightening in my stomach, because I had been coming to this house for three years, and I knew how this scene went.

I knew there was a turn coming.