“It’s okay, honey.” She carried on and explained everything about how she had come to the decision to speak to Ava’s doctor. I tried my best to appeal to their empathy when it was my turn to speak. I reiterated that we loved my sister and only want to help—what other motivation could we possibly have? I told them I understood that they thought they were doing the right thing but that we’d known Penny her whole life, and we saw this all in a context they couldn’t. I was begging them to listen to us, but I could see their implacable expressions. Penny didn’t look us in the eyes even once.

The whole ordeal was messy and complicated. The wheels of the court kept turning; Ava’s court-appointed special advocate filed a motion to try to have Penny and Ava placed with my parents, but it was denied. A psychologist evaluated Penny and found her to be deeply disturbed. Given his limited exposure to her, he told us, it was impossible for him to diagnose something as complex as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is mostly defined by a series of actions rather than traits, but that she certainly fit the profile, as well as showing strong indications of narcissistic personality disorder, something often paired with the MSP. Initially, his diagnosis felt like a win. After all, the psychologist was a neutral party, agreed to by both sides. I realized just how deeply I’d begun to doubt reality itself by then. On an intellectual level, I knew Penny lied, I had plenty of evidence. But on a visceral level, it still felt hard to reconcile. She didn’t seem to be lying much of the time, and it was unclear—even with the psychologist’s diagnosis—whether or not she knew she was lying, or if she had genuinely lost track of the truth.

Of all the things I cannot reconcile about this time, one is my strange nostalgia for it. As murky and complex as the legal proceedings were, at least we had forward momentum after all the years of inertia and worry. It was impossible to imagine that all of this would lead to nothing.

I imagined then that the summit of this awful climb was just beyond the horizon, that my life could soon go back to its normal trajectory. Having this finish line in sight let me compartmentalize and focus on my training, even enjoying a couple of the training camps in Mammoth and New Zealand. Whenever I tried to talk to Luke about Penny, he said, “Babe, don’t think about it. Focus on the good, okay? It’ll all work out.”

Maybe he thought he was reassuring me, but the message was clear: he was done hearing about this.