I didn’t plan to become the villain of my little sister’s mythology. It just sort of happened—like mold in the grout, the story bloomed in the damp corners of our family until it turned black and no one noticed they were inhaling it. I was the ambitious one, the one with straight A’s and color-coded planners and a soccer bag that smelled like determination and mint gum. Emma was the miracle baby: two months early, blue as a fallen sky, nurses rallying, tubes, machines, the whole symphony of beeps and whispered prayers. My parents learned to watch her chest more than the clock. They started measuring time in breaths.

When she finally came home, our house became a hushed chapel. We had rules for everything—how loud the TV could be, how fast you could shut a door, which foods were “gentle.” They weren’t a burden at first. I loved her. We all did. She was our little fragile comet, and we orbited her faithfully.

But comets don’t stay fragile. The equipment disappeared. Emma’s cheeks pinked up. One day the only wires around her were the headphone cords of a glittery MP3 player. Somehow, the rules stayed; they just changed shape. The sound had to be gentle because Emma’s head hurt. The lights had to be gentle because Emma’s eyes hurt. The schedule had to be gentle because Emma’s tummy hurt. I watched the way my parents leaned toward her when she made a face, the way everyone fell into attentive silence. Emma learned that pain could be a door—one she alone could open—and on the other side was a room full of soft chairs and ice cream.

It wasn’t the pain that made me uneasy at first. It was the timing. Headache during math homework. Stomach ache during chores. A fainting spell when my varsity jersey was fresh from the press. She went down like a slow felled tree in the stands at my first game, and my parents left with her, apologizing over their shoulders while I pretended the field lights weren’t blurring because of the tears in my eyes.

“Don’t be cruel,” my mother hissed later when she caught me scowling at my sister lying theatrically on the couch. “You know she suffers.”

“She practices her pain faces in the mirror,” I said, because I’d seen it: Emma alone in the hallway mirror, pulling her mouth into valiant grimaces, testing which angle was most saintly. I said it half-joking, trying to shock my mother into seeing what I saw.

“She does not,” Mom said, and just like that I was the liar who resented a sick child.

The story hardened. I felt it every time my wins got interrupted by Emma’s well-timed collapse. My acceptance into college happened at an ER with fluorescent lights, my email still open on my phone while a nurse told us dehydration can mimic all sorts of symptoms. Later, when the test results were normal, Emma looked at me and smiled—a secret little curve of her mouth like a cat who’d learned to open the fridge.

I retreated the way ambitious people retreat: into tracking and controls. The more I watched, the more a rhythm emerged, a mechanical metronome tick-ticking underneath the melodrama. She always grabbed the right side—right temple, right ribs, right kidney—with her right hand. She always called for Mom first. She always gave pain a number between eight and nine. She recovered in two to three hours. Two, if the night was getting late. Three, if I was glowing too bright.

It might have gone on forever if she hadn’t taken Jake. He was scrubbed and kind, the first boy who brought my mother flowers for no reason. He had a way of listening like your words took the weight off his chest. And then one day at the coffee shop with chalkboard menus and cinnamon dust in the air, he slid his phone toward me like a divorce lawyer.

“Sarah,” he said, face pale with practiced fairness. “I can’t. Not anymore.”

The messages were all me—or a version of me. They used my slang. They referenced a teacher’s mole and the way Coach Jim chewed sunflower seeds like a machine. “I wish she’d die already,” one read, coolly vicious. “She’s faking. She’s always faking.”

“I didn’t write this,” I said, feeling the floor give way beneath my neatly calendared life.

Jake looked like someone had held his head underwater. “They came from an account with your photo. You added me from it. You wrote to me from it.”

Behind my ribs something hot pressed outward. “Emma did this.”

“Don’t,” he said, because it sounded like the meanest thing an older sister could say. He left his cup half full. Outside, the sun was unfairly bright. I stood there with too much light on my face and the sweetness of cinnamon turning sour in the back of my throat.

Emma texted me a selfie later in my hoodie, the one Jake had given me. She was making a duck face. I threw up for the first time in five years.

That was the moment I turned into a scientist. I started recording. Not just mentally—physically. Timestamps. Notes. Where her hand went first, who she called, how long until the suggestion of the ER, the exact time until she perked back up, miraculously refreshed enough to sing along to a song or take a photo with perfect eyeliner. I pivoted to the kind of cold curiosity that scared me a little. It had teeth.

I found a friend in the school office who once owed me a favor and was tired of watching small dramas spill into the aisles of a graduation ceremony. Two weeks later, I had camera footage on my phone of Emma alone in the hallway, checking her reflection, practicing how to clutch her chest with artful restraint and then recover with brave, trembling breaths. Another friend who’d done a summer internship with a tech company showed me how to retrieve backups. We found the fake account’s emails, the timing aligned with my classes. And the audio message—oh, the audio message—Emma on the phone with Beatrice, laughing, the lightness of someone workshopping a prank.

“It’s really easy, Bea,” she said in the recording. “Right side works best. Mom goes nuclear if I say it’s my head. And it’s always better when Sarah’s excited. They turn on her so fast.” Beatrice snorted. “You’re terrible.” Emma’s voice warmed. “No, I’m efficient.”

There’s a particular kind of calm that feels like an ocean after a storm, flat and glossy and deceptively peaceful. The week of the family dinner, I floated on it. Twenty minutes before we sat down, I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom and recorded a video.

“It’s 6:40 p.m. Sunday,” I said to the front-facing camera, my voice surprisingly steady. “In twenty minutes, I’m going to announce a fake promotion at work. Here’s what Emma will do.” I laid it out—a simple, ruthless prediction like a weather report.

Downstairs, the table was a parade of casseroles and florals. Uncles in polos, aunts in soft cardigans, cousins buzzing like we were a hive. The wood smelled like lemon polish; somebody had emptied an entire can. Dad poured wine. Mom had a glow that softened her face until she looked five years younger. Emma sat near the far end between Marcus and Aunt Sandra, idly sculpting mashed potatoes into little waves with the side of her fork.

I stood and clinked my glass. It felt like throwing a switch.

“I have news,” I said. My smile stretched across my face like an elastic that might snap. “I was promoted.”

The room erupted in the kind of music I’d always loved—praise, silly uncle jokes about how I’d finally pick up a check (“Careful, rich niece!” Roberto crowed), Grandma telling me she had a list of medications I could help with now that I had money. I let it wash over me, but my eyes stayed hooked to Emma. For a heartbeat—two—she looked genuinely pleased. Then a little tightening at her eyes. A scan of the room. The calculation.

Her fork clinked against the plate. “Just a headache,” she murmured to Sandra, brave as a soldier in a war film. “It’s fine.”

I kept smiling, breath counting in my head. Three. Two. One.

Her right hand drifted to the right side of her abdomen like a bird finding a familiar branch.

Marcus leaned in. “Em? You okay?”

“It’s nothing,” she whispered, voice thin for the audience. “I’m sure it’ll pass.”

Dad, predictable as gravity, had the keys in his palm by the time she said nine. Mom was up so fast her napkin slithered to the floor. Grandma crossed herself. Someone mentioned appendicitis. The attention in the room swung away from me as smoothly as a compass needle finding north. Emma looked at me then, a quick private glance, and smiled—tiny, evil, like she’d just nicked me with a razor where the bruise wouldn’t show.

“Wait,” I said.

It came out soft, but it had a different kind of gravity. Maybe it was the confidence of a magician with two doves up her sleeve. Everyone paused. Mom’s hand hovered over Emma’s hair as if she could pet the pain away.

“Sarah,” Mom hissed. “Not now.”

“Exactly now,” I said. I held up my phone. “I recorded something twenty minutes ago. You need to see it.”

“Sarah.” Emma did my favorite of her theatrics—the weak scolding. “Please. I’m in a lot of pain.”

“I know exactly how much,” I said. “And I know when it will end.”

“Sarah, what are you doing?” Aunt Sandra whispered.

I hit play. My own face bloomed in the room, casual and damning. “It’s 6:40 p.m. Sunday,” the video-me said. “In twenty minutes, I’m going to make a false announcement about a promotion. Emma will wait for the applause to finish. Then she’ll hold the right side of her body and call for Mom. Pain at eight or nine. She’ll ask to lie down and suggest the hospital in fifteen minutes.”

It was like the air changed weight. The clock on the wall ticked. Emma froze mid-performance, right hand still pressed to right side, like she’d been cut out of a painting.

“She always holds the right side,” my phone self continued. “No matter what kind of pain. Always calls for Mom first. Always recovers in two to three hours.”

“Emma?” Grandma said, voice thin as tissue. “Is this…is this true?”

“I don’t know what Sarah is talking about,” Emma said, choosing indignation and tremble in equal measure. “I’m really in pain. Do you not believe me?”

“I’m not done,” I said, and suddenly I wasn’t the one who needed people to believe me. The videos and screenshots piled in my camera roll like ammunition. I opened the graduation hallway clip. Emma, five minutes before the ceremony, alone, practicing faces. Aunt Sandra gasped. The room tilted toward condemnation.

“Stop it,” Emma hissed, and now her voice sounded like the girl who’d texted me in my hoodie. “Sarah, stop.”

I swiped. The messages. The fake account. The timestamps that lined up perfectly with my classes. Jake’s added friend notification and the subsequent “I hate her”s. Dad’s face when he took my phone looked like someone had told him the house he built wasn’t level. He read in silence, his jaw going slack with shame and disbelief.

“There’s audio, too,” I said, and hit play. Emma’s voice spilled into the room, bright and smug, instructing Beatrice like she was teaching a recipe. Mom sunk back into her chair like the floor had given way beneath her. Grandma stared at the tablecloth, the blue flowers thrown into sudden doubt.

“Emma,” Dad said finally, voice shaking, “tell me this is some kind of sick joke.”

She went very still. Then something in her snapped. “Okay,” she said, chin jerking up, the victim mask finally falling. “Fine. I faked it. A couple times. A few times. You don’t understand. You never have.”

“You faked it for years,” I said. It came out cold, a scalpel, not a shout.

“You think it’s easy being perfect Sarah’s sister?” She laughed, and it wasn’t pretty. “Sarah the golden child. Sarah who never gets in trouble. I was the girl who almost died. The only time anyone looked at me is when I looked like I might die again.”

“You weren’t dying,” Dad said, and there were five years of swallowed skepticism in his voice, thick and bitter. “You were lying.”

“Because it worked,” she shouted, and for a second she looked like a younger version of me, exposed and furious. “Because otherwise I disappeared.”

I might have left it there—let the room simmer in that awful truth—if not for the other rot I’d uncovered along the way. “There’s more,” I said.

Emma’s eyes darted like a trapped animal. “Sarah—”

“The money,” I said.

Mom’s hand went to her throat. “What money?”

“The money for medicine,” I said. “Three thousand in six months. No prescription. No receipt. But plenty of photos on Instagram—the clothes, the makeup, the drinks.”

“Emma,” Dad said, voice suddenly dangerous. “Tell me you did not take money from us under false pretenses.”

Her silence was a confession that echoed.

Mom’s tears made a neat river through her foundation. “Fifteen years,” she whispered. “Fifteen years of terror every time you put your hand to your head.”

“Fifteen years of my life,” I said, surprising myself with how steady I sounded. “Fifteen years of being called cruel because I didn’t coddle you. Fifteen years of my milestones being rebranded as your emergency.”

“Sarah, I—” Emma’s voice cracked. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

“No,” I said, and the word felt like a slammed door. “You’re sorry you got caught.”

I could have stopped. I should have stopped. But there was one last rotten board underneath this house we all lived in, and I was done pretending not to feel it sag.

“Tell them about Mike,” I said.

The room said the name back like a kid testing the sound of a curse word. Mom’s eyes went confused then wide. “Mike? But you and Mike—he moved—”

“He moved after,” I said. I kept my eyes on Emma because she couldn’t decide which face to wear anymore. She trembled without meaning to. “He told me he wanted to buy a ring. And Emma decided to help.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Yes,” I said. The screenshots were simple. Lingerie. Pouting. Carefully crafted waif-vulnerability captions. “She told him I wasn’t ready. Then she sent photos. She set up ‘accidental’ encounters. She scheduled trysts during her medical appointments.” I threw the word down like a bone. “He believed her. For a while.”

Aunt Sandra made a small sound like disgust and pity bleakly married. Grandma stared at the wall so hard it might have cracked under the focus.

“You’re sick,” Uncle Roberto murmured into his napkin, and for the first time no one rushed to defend her.

“Do you want to know the saddest part?” I said. “She only gave up when I didn’t crumble. When I got a job I loved and smiled again. She quit that conquest because the prize wasn’t sparkling anymore.”

“Sarah, please,” Mom whispered. “Enough.”

“No.” I turned to Emma fully, the cool in me flaring to something hotter. “You took three relationships from me. Jake with fake messages. Tyler with lies. Mike with…with you. You stole clean memories and made them sticky. You folded every good dress of my life into your mouth and chewed.”

Emma, cornered, lashed out. “At least you had dresses to chew. I had a hospital gown.”

It landed. For a second, it landed. There was the little girl, the ventilators, the monitors. But then my body remembered the graduation video. The audio. My hoodie on her, on purpose. I exhaled.

“Where are you going?” Mom asked as I slung my purse over my shoulder.

“Away,” I said. “I’m going to build a life where you can’t reach me when you need attention.”

“Sarah, don’t walk out,” Dad said, old formal disappointment mixing with new humiliation in his voice. “We will fix this.”

“You can’t fix someone else’s character,” I said. “You can only stop renting it rooms in your house.”

I got to the door before I realized my hands were shaking. I wasn’t righteous. I wasn’t triumphant. I was empty in a way that felt clean, like something corrosive had been flushed out. Behind me, Emma started a new kind of screaming—high, animal, real. I shut the door anyway and stepped into the cool evening, the cicadas sawing away like it was any other Sunday.

---

The first night alone in my apartment didn’t feel like victory. It felt like after a fire when the smell of smoke has sunk into your clothes and you scrape soot off sentimental things. I tossed and turned until I finally got up and made tea at three in the morning like it was an antidote. Across the room, my phone blinked with notifications. I let it blink.

At nine, Dad called. I didn’t answer. At ten, Mom called. I didn’t answer. At noon, Grandma tried. I was tempted. I almost picked up. I didn’t. I took a shower so long the mirror turned completely opaque.

That evening, someone knocked. I peered through the peephole expecting a family delegation and saw Jake instead, in the same old denim jacket, looking older in a way that had nothing to do with time.

“I heard,” he said when I cracked the door.

“How?”

“Your mom called me,” he said, staring at his shoes. “She was…not well.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

“For believing her?” My voice was flat with no place to put the volume. “I would have believed her too.”

“I should have known you better,” he said. His eyes were the same: kind, infuriatingly kind. “She was very convincing.”

“She is,” I said, because I had to practice using past tense about things that weren’t people.

He held out a small envelope—no apology card, just something humble from a drugstore. “There are photos from that day,” he said. “Of us. I thought they were gone. I didn’t delete them. She did. I found them in the cloud.” He smiled, painful and true. “You look happy in them.”

“I was,” I said, and the grief was a soft ache, not the ripping kind.

He rocked back on his heels. “Do you want to come get coffee sometime?”

“No,” I said, and then added because it was unfair to leave it there, “Not yet.”

He nodded, and relief moved through his face like weather. “Not yet,” he repeated. He left me with the envelope and the awkward grace of someone backing out of a room without knocking anything over.

That night I answered Dad’s call.

“Sarah,” he said, voice torn. “I am so sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize for not seeing what you weren’t allowed to see,” I said. I was trying out mercy like you try on a dress you think you can’t afford.

He exhaled. “We enabled it.”

“You loved her,” I said. “You loved us both. I’m still angry, but I know that.”

“I’ve booked a therapy appointment for all of us,” he said. “Family. Individual. Your mother hasn’t stopped crying.”

“Good,” I said, and we both heard the edge in it. “She should cry. I cried for years.”

“We won’t ask you to come,” he said quickly. “You can come when you’re ready.”

“Not yet,” I said, and he laughed, a sound like a shared joke in a lifeboat.

“Not yet,” he echoed. “Your grandma wants you to know she loves you. She told me to say the exact words: ‘She is my brave girl who pulls splinters even when it hurts.’”

I pictured Grandma’s hands, warm and papery, holding a tiny needle above my childhood knee. I swallowed a sudden boulder in my throat. “Tell her I love her too.”

Dad hesitated. “Emma…”

“No,” I said, and he stopped.

“I love you,” he said instead.

“Me too,” I said, and allowed myself the indulgence of thinking “me too” was enough for tonight.

---

The next Sunday I didn’t go to family dinner. I went to the park with a book I didn’t read and sat on a bench watching two little boys make a game out of throwing leaves at a lamppost. Somewhere, a woman laughed, a messy, unembarrassed sound that gave me hope.

On Monday, my boss poked her head into my cubicle. “I heard you got promoted,” she said, teasing.

“Fake news,” I said, and she raised an eyebrow until I explained in a version that left out the horror. “Family drama,” I finished lamely.

“My sympathies,” she said. “No promotion yet. But I did put your name on a project with real teeth.”

“I like teeth,” I said, and meant it.

After lunch, a text from a number I didn’t recognize. “It’s Beatrice,” it read. “I heard the audio. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you texting me?” I wrote back before I could turn the heat down.

“Because I was complicit,” she wrote. “Because I laughed. Because once I watched her practice and I said nothing. Because you deserved better.”

I stared at the dots for a long, angry time. Then I typed, “Yes. I did.” I didn’t say more. Forgiveness is tender and expensive; you don’t throw it around like confetti.

That evening, Mom called and I picked up. Her voice was shredded. “I don’t expect you to forgive me,” she said without saying hello. “I expect you to heal. I want you to heal somewhere we can’t sabotage.”

“I’m safe,” I said, surprised to realize it was true. I had locked my door. I had walked in my own kitchen and chosen my own cup. I had slept, eventually.

“Emma is with Aunt Sandra for now,” Mom said. “Your father told her she couldn’t live here until she agreed to therapy and restitution. He used the word ‘restitution’ like he was auditioning for a courtroom drama,” she added with a broken laugh. “I love you. I loved you then. I just…loved stupidly.”

“You loved loudly,” I said. “That was enough to drown me out.”

“I’m learning how to cup my hands,” she said softly. “Less ocean, more bowl.”

We were quiet for a while, a peaceful quiet, a tired quiet. “Tell Grandma I’ll come by next week,” I said. “If she makes that lemon cake.”

“She will,” Mom said. “She already took the butter out.”

---

Two weeks later, I went. Grandma hugged me like she was trying to gather up all the years that had gone loose. She made me tea in the old chipped cup with violets, the one that had survived so many dishwashers it felt like a veteran. “You are my brave girl who pulls splinters even when it hurts,” she said, and I burst into tears because being seen without explaining is a mercy I had almost forgotten.

We ate lemon cake at the kitchen table. It was tart and perfect. Mom came in late, eyes thinner, shoulders somehow both higher and lower. She didn’t rush my plate away when I finished. She sat. We talked about ordinary things—the neighbor’s new dog, the pothole on Third, whether that coffee place on the corner had better muffins since the ownership change. We performed normal like a trust exercise. It held.

“Emma wants to talk to you,” Mom blurted as I washed my plate.

“No,” I said.

“Someday?”

“Maybe,” I said. “When my life is too full to be knocked over.”

She nodded like she was practicing acceptance the way I was practicing patience. “She’s…” Mom paused. “She’s not okay.”

“She isn’t,” I agreed, and felt the complicated tug in my chest of empathy and rage braided together. “I hope she gets okay in ways that don’t hurt other people.”

We let that be the prayer.

---

Months later, when the air smelled like new leaves and buses, I ran into Emma outside a pharmacy. She wore a gray hoodie, no makeup, hair in a low, shy knot that reminded me of her at twelve. For a second, the past punched me in the face and I saw my mother’s baby blue again, wires and all.

“Hi,” she said, small.

“Hi,” I said, because we were in public and I had decided not to be a monster.

We stood there like strangers on the edge of a stupid miracle—what if this time she said the exact right thing in the exact right order? What if I had the exact right reply?

“I’m in therapy,” she said. She said it like an apology she had polished in her mouth until it was smooth. “Group and individual. I pay for it. I got a job. I bring coffee to tables that are sticky. People are rude. It is humbling.”

“Good,” I said. Then, because it was the truth and I was tired of heavy armor, “I hope you’re doing the work.”

“I am,” she said. Her eyes were red rimmed but clear. “It’s ugly.”

“It usually is,” I said.

She nodded like we were strangers who had both survived separate wars. “I won’t ask you for forgiveness,” she said. “I’ll ask you to watch.”

“I won’t watch,” I said gently. “I’ll hear about it.”

She swallowed. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

We stepped apart like magnets flipping poles. I went home and stirred pasta sauce with a wooden spoon and cried into the steam where no one could pretend it was for someone else’s benefit.

---

The next time family dinner happened, it was smaller. People brought less food and more listening. Aunt Sandra asked me about work and didn’t look toward the door. Uncle Roberto apologized for a joke he’d made five years ago that I barely remembered. Grandma insisted on taking a photo of me by the window “for the mantle,” and then laughed at herself because she doesn’t have a mantle. We were awkward and sincere and a little overcareful like people who had learned, finally, that attention is a tool and not a toy.

After cake, Dad asked, “Do you want to make a toast?” His voice was careful the way you hold a newborn.

I considered how to make a speech that wasn’t a trap. “Not a toast,” I said. “A practice.”

They waited.

I cleared my throat. “When someone has news,” I said, “we pause. We give them the room. We keep it. If someone is in pain, we get them help—but not at the expense of silencing a celebration. We are a big enough family to hold both.”

Mom nodded, tears immediate. “We can be a both family,” she said.

We tried it. It was weird at first, ritualizing what should be obvious. But it worked. Cousin Julia shared a new job, and when Grandpa’s back twinged, Dad quietly got him a pillow and some Tylenol without anyone cutting off Julia mid-sentence to catastrophize. Later, when Grandma got tired and rubbed her temples, we dimmed the lights and finished the story we were listening to. We discovered we could string joy and care on the same thread.

On my walk home, the night air was sweet in a way I didn’t trust but welcomed anyway. My phone buzzed. It was a message from an unknown number again, but this time it was just a photo—a table at a diner, the check split, five scribbled signatures, sticky ketchup bottle in frame. “Restitution, round one,” the caption read. The number wasn’t saved, but I knew. I didn’t respond. I took the long way home.

The next morning, my boss called me into a glass-walled conference room. “Remember when I joked about your promotion?” she said, grinning. “Turns out I’m not psychic. But I am prophetic. It’s yours if you want it.”

I laughed, the sound strange in my mouth, light. “You didn’t make me announce anything terrible first, did you?”

“No,” she said, amused but mostly kind. “Just show up. Do the work you already do. Let people see it.”

I said yes. I went back to my desk and texted my father: “This time it’s real.” He sent back a string of emojis like a man who had discovered emoji the day before and was very excited to use them responsibly. I sent Grandma a photo of lemon cake from a bakery and told her this one wasn’t as good. She responded with a picture of a stick of butter on her counter.

In the early evening, I went for a run by the river. The water looked like glass with something wild underneath it. I ran until my lungs hurt, and then I stopped and watched the water and let the hurt be clean. My phone buzzed again. It was Jake. “Coffee?” he wrote. “Not yet?” I stared. Then I typed, “Maybe.”

I stood there with the sun on my face and the whole, foolish, hard, ordinary world spread out in front of me like a map I finally recognized. Behind me, there were years that would never stop being complicated. Ahead of me, there were Tuesdays and project briefs and a grandmother’s cake and a mother’s apology still softening and a sister in therapy and a father learning new rituals and a boy who might or might not become a man in my life again. I took a breath. I took another.

And when I walked home, no one clutched at their right side. No one told me to be quiet. The evening made room, and for once, the attention was mine—but so was the responsibility of holding it gently. I turned the key in my lock and stepped into my own home, where pain and celebration could finally live without canceling each other out, where a girl could both keep her joy and care for someone else’s hurt, where a liar could learn to tell the truth without being allowed to set fire to the table again.

Later, when the kettle hissed and the apartment was scented with tea, my phone blinked one last time. It was a short message from a contact I hadn’t saved: “Thank you for not destroying me.” I stared at it until the water cooled. Then I typed back, “Thank you for not destroying me, too.” I hit send. I turned off my phone. I sat at my table and tasted quiet that wasn’t an accusation.

When the calendar alert popped up the next day—“Team check-in: prepare talking points”—I opened a new document. I wrote: Speak clearly. Hold the room. Tell the truth. Don’t set yourself on fire to keep anyone warm. Then I walked into the meeting and said, “I have news,” and watched as faces turned toward me not out of panic, not out of habit, but because we had all learned something sharp and necessary.

“Go ahead,” my manager said, smiling. “We’re listening.”