hree days before Easter, my mother sent me a text that read like a polite eviction notice from my own family.We want a quiet holiday this year, just us and your sister’s family. We need some space. Hope you understand.I read it twice, standing in the produce section of a grocery store in Sacramento, holding a bag of carrots I had bought specifically for the honey-glazed ham I had been planning to bring. I put the carrots back on the shelf. I walked out of the store. I sat in my car for eleven minutes without starting the engine, staring at the steering wheel and trying to understand why my hands were shaking when I should have been crying instead.The thing was, I was not surprised. That was the part that hurt most. Somewhere in the part of me that had been quietly keeping score since I was eight years old, I had been waiting for exactly this message. The wording was new. The sentiment was not.My name is Marlo Easterbrook. I am thirty-four years old, and I had spent the previous six weeks preparing for an Easter dinner that apparently nobody had wanted me at in the first place.

I typed back one word: perfect. No punctuation, no follow-up, no softening. I watched the delivered notification appear. I put my phone face down on the passenger seat and drove home.My younger sister Coralene had been the center of our family’s solar system for as long as I could remember. I do not say this with the bitter sharpness of someone still raw from it. I say it as plain fact, the way you state the weather. Coralene had required more: more patience, more money, more reassurance, more arrangements made on her behalf. She had dropped out of two colleges our parents paid for, been involved in three car accidents, married a man named Brennan who had been fired from four jobs in five years, and produced one genuinely delightful daughter named Posie who was, in my view, the only unambiguously good outcome of any of it. Through all of it, our parents had oriented themselves around Coralene the way a plant orients toward light, leaning steadily and without apparent awareness that they were leaning.