I was six when my mother first called Tiffany “our little star” in front of company and me “the easy one” in the same breath. Ten when Tiffany broke my front tooth with a swing set chain and convinced my parents I had run into it. Fourteen when my father used money from the savings account Aunt Betty opened for me to pay for Tiffany’s dance nationals, then called it borrowing between sisters. Sixteen when I won a state science prize and my mother asked if the banquet could be moved because Tiffany had a spray tan appointment. Twenty-three when Tiffany introduced me to Brett at a rooftop fundraiser, all bright teeth and sisterly affection, then spent the rest of the night making jokes about how he was “too charming for boring Val” as if preemptively framing my happiness as borrowed.
Even after Aunt Betty died and left everything to me, I still kept trying to solve the riddle of their approval. That was the deepest humiliation. Not that they hated me. That I knew, in some buried way, they always had. The real humiliation was how long I kept offering myself to be loved anyway.
At nine the next morning, I was sitting in Margaret Higgins’s office.
Mrs. Higgins had handled Aunt Betty’s estate and the legal war that followed when my parents contested the will. She was sixty if she was a day, silver-blonde, razor straight posture, ivory blouse under a dark green suit, and the sort of expression that made entitled men overexplain themselves before she had said a word. Her office smelled faintly of lemon oil and paper. A bowl of peppermints sat untouched on the corner of her desk.
She listened without interruption while I laid out the screenshots, the call log, the photos, the banking transactions. When I finished, she folded her hands and studied me for a long moment.
“How much of the house do they believe they already control?” she asked.
“Enough to make plans for where I’d live in the basement.”
One corner of her mouth moved. Not amusement. Recognition.
“People like this tell on themselves through assumptions,” she said. “They only plan that boldly when they believe the paperwork is already in motion.”
She opened a slim file from her desk drawer.
“I made one inquiry before you arrived,” she said. “Merely to satisfy my own suspicion.”
She slid the top document toward me.