At Christmas dinner, my sister lifted her glass, smiled like she was delivering a punchline, and introduced me to her boyfriend with one sentence: “This is the failure of our family.”

People in town called it loneliness, and maybe some of it was. But even at fifteen I knew loneliness wasn’t the whole story. Fear was. Fear of coming home to a daughter whose face kept opening an old wound. Fear of the stillness that settled at dinner when there was no one to fill it. Fear of the fact that love, once buried, leaves behind chores and bills and an ache too large to name. Tina appeared in our lives wearing bright lipstick, expensive perfume, and the confidence of someone who had always believed she knew how a house should be run. She brought along a daughter, Chloe, who was one year younger than me and already carried herself like a girl accustomed to entering rooms as though applause were a natural weather pattern that followed her.