When my parents and I pressed her to explain after my call with Emily, Penny cried, collapsed, shut down. How could we do this to her when she was in so much pain? And we didn’t want to grill her any more than she wanted to explain herself. No, it was Jon’s fault, we decided, Jon who was not on his way back from anywhere but gone for good. It’s the oldest story in the book: man knocks woman up, panics, flees the scene. Tragically, the woman is so distraught she loses the pregnancy. The simplest explanation is usually the truth, so why wouldn’t that be it?

Because Penny had been pregnant. Hadn’t she? She’d looked pregnant, shown us ultrasound pictures, and I had felt the baby kick. I’d felt its tiny living foot collide with my hand from inside of my sister, it’s not something you imagine. It had to have been real.

Much later, when it was clear that this incident was not the ending of a sad chapter but the beginning of a much more harrowing one, my parents would confess that they suspected something more disturbing, even though I would not let myself. Pseudocyesis. False pregnancy, a condition in which all the symptoms of the pregnancy are there—weight gain, nausea, swelling, even the sensation that a baby is moving inside of you—but the fetus is not. But even this left more questions than answers. Hysteria might make a woman believe she felt a baby kicking inside of her, but could it make her sister believe the same? And had Penny known the ultrasound picture wasn’t hers? Which parts of the lie were real to her and which did she knowingly manufacture?

This is where my parents’ experience of Penny and mine began to truly diverge. I finished my season third in the World Cup standings after I podiumed in Innsbruck and won in Lillehammer, mollifying my sponsors after I’d missed my big race in St. Moritz. Luke and I were now a bona fide power couple. Two top skiers from the same birth year. It was a rare phenomenon to have two top skiers from the same birth year, and the fact that we were a couple made us a favorite among the small cadre of American journalists and fans who cared about the sport.