“‘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 listened and laughed in the right places and said nothing about what I was planning because I didn’t know how to say it, and because part of me understood that saying it to Cassidy before I said it to my mother would be a kind of disloyalty to both of them.
So I held it.
I was good at holding things. I had been practicing for years.
