Six years is a long time to pretend someone doesn’t exist.
My sister and I managed it, though. We were good at silence. We perfected it after our mother died, when grief mixed with paperwork and old resentments, and somehow an argument about her estate turned into a referendum on our entire childhood. Who sacrificed more. Who was favored. Who deserved what. Money didn’t create the ugliness, but it gave it a microphone.
