“‘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”

I was moving toward. I just hadn’t told anyone yet.

The hardest part of that three-month gap was Cassidy. She called me from Richmond twice a week that spring, the way she always had, and she talked about the things she was doing—finishing her junior year of high school, deciding which colleges to apply to, a boy she liked who worked at the coffee shop continue reading …