“‘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”

“Diana, after everything—”

“I’ll let you know, Mom.”

Cassidy called two days after that.

She didn’t have a prepared speech. She had a request, stated plainly: would I please come to Christmas and not make things more complicated than they needed to be?

She said it the way she had said variations of the same thing for years, with the worn familiarity of continue reading …