I never told my parents the truth about who my husband really was. In their eyes, he was simply a disappointment compared to my sister’s successful CEO husband. When I went into labor earlier than expected while my husband was overseas, the pain hi:t hard and fast.

My sister Claire, meanwhile, had done everything right.

According to family mythology, Claire had emerged from the womb already poised, already superior, already scented with expensive perfume and predestined for rooms with glass walls and city views. She had perfected our mother’s smile by the age of sixteen—the exact tilt of lips that communicated charm and contempt in the same elegant motion—and she had used it to float through life with the assurance of someone who never had to wonder if she belonged. Claire married Daniel Mercer two years before I married Ethan, and my parents had treated the wedding as though a royal alliance had been forged.

Daniel was a CEO. Not just any CEO, either. He was the kind my father could repeat with satisfaction to friends at the club, the kind my mother could mention over lunch with just enough false modesty to invite admiration.

“Claire is so lucky,” she would say, dabbing the corners of her mouth with a linen napkin. “Daniel works so hard. Such vision. Such discipline.”