My parents took her side anyway. My mother called it what she always calls it, a misunderstanding between sisters, and I finally said the sentence I had been swallowing since I was nineteen: that they had raised one daughter to take and one to absorb it. We have not spoken in two years. That is the part of this that still costs me.

Imani is twelve. She wants to be a forensic accountant, which she can spell, and which she explains to strangers at length.

Last spring she asked whether I was ever going to forgive Aunt Shantelle. I told her forgiveness was not the question I was working on. The question was whether I would keep handing my life to people who had shown me exactly what they would do with it.

For thirty-seven years I was the reliable one, which in my family meant the one who could be taken from quietly. It took a child on a kitchen floor, refusing to panic, to show me that being steady is not the same as being available. She did not rescue me. She just refused to accept that I was unrescuable, and it turns out that is what being seen actually looks like.