“Penny, it is not like that. We’re just worried. After everything that happened with the babies three years ago . . . it just . . . we want to help!”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” she said.

Now I started to get angry. She acted as though faking a pregnancy were some normal youthful blunder, an ordinary and irrelevant chapter in her past. Penny lived in the moment in the most terrible way: apathetic to the burning wreckage she’d left in her wake. “Penny!” I said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through? I thought I had two nieces on the way! I bought them toys and books! I mourned them, Penny, when they died.” I couldn’t even say the rest of it: that they never existed. They’d been a delusion at best, a cold-blooded, manipulative lie at worst. She created them and then she killed them. Was my sister crazy or evil? I still don’t know.

“Stop pretending to care about me,” she said dismissively, landing a gut punch and avoiding the accusation in one swift moment.

“Of course I care about you. I love you, you’re my sister!”

“Like that’s ever mattered to you. The only thing you care about is skiing, and being Mom and Dad’s golden child. So just stop it, okay? It’s not like we’re close.”

“Penny, how can you say that?” My mind raced. Weren’t we close? Hadn’t I done what I could to be a good sister? Yes, I’d been focused on my skiing, but I’d tried to be there for Penny, hadn’t I? I’d listened to her as she obsessed endlessly over her health, over Ava’s. I’d tried to carry some of her pain for her, not that it ever worked. “I love you. Mom and Dad love you. We just want to help.”

“I don’t have time for this bullshit,” Penny said with venomous efficiency, as though she were a customer-service rep at the end of her rope. “I have my own family, and they’re in crisis right now, thanks to you three.”

“Penny, don’t do this.”

“I have to go.” Just before she hung up, I heard Ava in the background, not crying but just making some sort of baby exclamation, the last time I’d hear her voice.

I sat there for a long moment after we’d hung up. I could hear Blair and Luke laughing in the next room. I’d told them both about Penny, and they’d been alarmed but had remained positive and reassured me that things would work out. It meant something coming from them; they knew my family, knew Penny, who—according to them—was just kind of weird and dramatic. But in that moment, I realized that they didn’t have any idea what I was dealing with. I was alone in this.