By the time I graduated community college, the shape of my family was already fixed. My father was a man who believed authority entitled him to comfort, admiration, and obedience in equal amounts. My mother was a woman who had made an art form of surviving him and called it wisdom. Madison, three years older than me, was the family’s axis. Everything bent toward her preferences. Her moods influenced dinner plans, weekend schedules, even the tone in the house. When she wanted a fresh manicure, my mother called it self-care. When she wanted a designer bag she absolutely could not afford, my father called it “investing in appearance.” When she announced, every few months, that she was about to change her life in some dramatic and expensive way, they all rearranged themselves to support the fantasy. Madison wasn’t cruel all the time. That would have made her easier to understand. Instead she was charming when charm cost her nothing, affectionate when affection brought her attention, and casually vicious in moments when she sensed someone else might become inconvenient. She lived as if the world owed her a better version of itself and my parents treated that delusion like ambition.