“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

dinner had done to my mother, but what it had done to Cassidy.

Cassidy had never been deliberately unkind. She had been careless, the way people are careless when they haven’t been required to be careful, when the world has accommodated them enough that they don’t notice the cost of their own inattention.

She had laughed at the dropout introduction, continue reading …