If anyone really tortured my parents about Penny, it was my parents. Every incident—every bad boyfriend, every lie she told, every strange overly emotional moment—was reopened like a cold case and examined down to the tiniest detail. As though it might lead us to what? An opportunity to go back and change it? And yes, my skiing, the unevenness of having such different daughters, how that affected their parenting; that’s occurred to them, I know it has, though they’re careful about how they discuss it whenever I’m around. They don’t want me to feel guilty, as though there’s any way they could save me from that. But a look at my cohort shows that this has nothing to do with it; no one else’s siblings turned out like Penny.

Still, there’s no moment we’ve obsessed over more than Penny’s first pregnancy.

The year Penny got pregnant was the best year of my life, but the thing about the best year of your life is that when you’re in it, you can only imagine that things will keep getting better. Not only did all three of us make the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, but we all podiumed—Blair with a silver in slalom, Luke with a gold in super-G and a silver in downhill, me with a bronze in super-G. My parents came to watch, along with Penny and Emily. Somewhere in an archive of old television footage, there exists several seconds of them—along with the blended Duncan clan—jumping up and down with signs near the bottom of the course. For once, it felt like Penny was proud of me.

She’d recently turned twenty-six and was getting rather anxious for Jon, who’d turned out to have some staying power, to propose. Twenty-six wasn’t so young to be getting married in Coeur d’Alene; plenty of people got hitched to their high school or college sweethearts even earlier, and Penny always had dreams of the domestic life that I couldn’t fathom. When she called me to tell me she was engaged, this wasn’t even her biggest piece of news.

“I haven’t even told Mom and Dad yet,” she said excitedly. “I’m due in March!”

I was in the midst of gearing up for the beginning of the new season in November, and I was on my way to dryland training when she called.

“One sec, Pen,” I said. Luke was looking at me expectantly. “Tell Coach I’ll be there when I can.”

Luke raised his eyebrows at me.

“Family emergency,” I said helplessly. If I cut Penny short on this call, she’d hold it against me for months. Things were good between us, but her moods were mercurial, and it forever felt like she might just slip through my fingers if I did or said the wrong thing.

Luke shook his head.

“Sorry, Pen, go on,” I said.