Empowered, I took my glass of wine and retreated to the master bath, where I indulged in a temperate shower, the glowing red numbers of the thermostat’s digital display assuring me I wouldn’t burn.

Then, at long last, I finally confronted the biggest question of the day, the true cause behind my rage and restlessness.

Hurricane Shana.

My big sister. Who claimed she’d taken me out of the closet, so many years ago, and held me close.

Because if you don’t have family, you don’t have anything at all.

I wanted her to love me. It was terrible. Illogical. Weak. Frail sentiment from a woman who knew better.

And yet I did.

When she’d talked of that last moment we’d had together in our parents’ house . . . For a moment, I could almost remember it. The sound of shouting men, pounding against the door. My father’s voice in the bathroom, my mother’s hushed reply.

Then Shana. My big sister coming for me. My big sister picking me up in her arms. My big sister telling me she loved me and would always keep me safe.

I loved her, too.

The water seemed thicker on my cheeks. Was I crying? Would there be any point? The four-year-old child who’d existed forty years ago was not the same woman incarcerated now. Grown-up Shana used people. Destroyed Mr. and Mrs. Davies’s lives, let alone the Johnsons’ and the Sgarzis’. And what about the other children who’d been in the home? Mrs. Davies had been right. Chances were, little Trevor had gotten shipped out to some terrible place where he’d been beaten or raped or otherwise corrupted by the relentless hopelessness of foster life, while pretty AnaRose had been pimped out to earn money for her mother’s desperate habit.

And Shana never even mentioned their names. Entire families, vanquished by her actions. It was as if they no longer existed for her. Because they didn’t. She had needed. She had wanted. Then she was done.

I pulled myself together, shutting off the shower.

This morning, my sister had gotten to me, because that was what she did best. I showed up to break up with her, as she put it, and suddenly she had this story she’d never told me once in twenty years. Standing there, listening to her talk, I’d been swept up in her spell. Just as that first prison guard, Frankie, or maybe the second one, Rich.

She was manipulative. Not being able to feel sentiment herself, she suffered no blinders when it came to human nature. She could observe, analyze, collect. The perfect predator.

And Donnie Johnson, thirty years ago, trudging to the lilac bushes to deliver his older cousin’s message? Had he been scared that night? Nervous about Shana’s reaction? Or at twelve, had he been too young to fully comprehend the dangers of breaking a teenage girl’s heart?