To know was to belong.

To carry food to the shed was to be, at last, the daughter who was trusted, the daughter who was chosen, the inside daughter to my outside one.

Our mother had bought Brigitte’s soul with the only currency Brigitte had ever wanted, which was to be preferred, and Brigitte had paid gladly because she did not understand until far too late what she was buying.

By the time she was old enough to understand, she was already an accomplice to a living man’s burial, and there is no clean way back from that; the only road left was to go deeper, to justify it, to grow the hard shell that let her stand at holidays with our father underground and feel, instead of horror, resentment at me for being the innocent one.

Her cruelty to me had never been about me either.

It was the cruelty of a person who has done something unforgivable and cannot bear the sight of someone whose hands are clean.