I was six when my mother first called Tiffany “our little star” in front of company and me “the easy one” in the same breath. Ten when Tiffany broke my front tooth with a swing set chain and convinced my parents I had run into it. Fourteen when my father used money from the savings account Aunt Betty opened for me to pay for Tiffany’s dance nationals, then called it borrowing between sisters. Sixteen when I won a state science prize and my mother asked if the banquet could be moved because Tiffany had a spray tan appointment. Twenty-three when Tiffany introduced me to Brett at a rooftop fundraiser, all bright teeth and sisterly affection, then spent the rest of the night making jokes about how he was “too charming for boring Val” as if preemptively framing my happiness as borrowed.
Even after Aunt Betty died and left everything to me, I still kept trying to solve the riddle of their approval. That was the deepest humiliation. Not that they hated me. That I knew, in some buried way, they always had. The real humiliation was how long I kept offering myself to be loved anyway.
At nine the next morning, I was sitting in Margaret Higgins’s office.