“‘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”

and contained, she was easy and open. She didn’t worry about what she was supposed to become because the expectation for her was lighter. She was the second daughter, the one who got to be warm and social and just generally present without the architecture of a law career strapped to her back from infancy.

I loved her for it.

We were close in the way continue reading …