Chapter 2

At first, what they took were small things.

My mother gave Evelyn the sapphire earrings my grandmother had left, saying it was her first winter formal and she needed "an heirloom that would make her feel secure." They were the gift my mother had promised me, in her own words, for my eighteenth birthday.

When I reminded her, she just looked blank for a moment. "Jewelry is just jewelry. Evelyn has no grandmother. Are you going to begrudge her even this?"

So I said I didn't begrudge it.

Later, Evelyn took a liking to the vintage dress I had saved half a year to buy. She wore it to the school's spring fundraiser gala and told the cameras, shyly, that it was "my sister's willingness to share" that let her feel like a real lady for the first time.

No one knew that before she took the dress, she had taken a pair of scissors to the other gown I had prepared for the gala, then cried and said she had only been trying to trim a loose thread for me.

The Columbia summer journalism program my father had signed me up for became Evelyn's too.

The day after her application deadline, my mother printed out the half-finished personal statement I had written and put it on the desk in Evelyn's room. She reworked it along the lines of my structure, and suddenly she had "found her direction in life."

My father said Evelyn needed the opportunity to build a résumé. I was smart anyway, and applying next year would be just the same.

I asked, "And what about my plans?"

My father's face hardened. "Why do you always treat her as a rival? We adopted her so she could survive, not to give you an enemy."

I looked at him and understood completely. As long as Evelyn was in the room, I would always be the villain.

The Hart family counted as respectable in Maple Ridge. My father ran a marine insurance brokerage, and my mother was a program director at an arts foundation. Outsiders knew only that my grandfather had come from Sicily and built his start in dock transport. They didn't know who the family company occasionally arranged containers for, or why my father's old friends never said their full names on the phone.

I had grown up hearing one rule. Family first.

But later they translated that rule into something else: Evelyn first, and I had to be understanding.

The cruelest irony was that every opportunity taken from me was packaged as one of my virtues. My mother would tell her friends that Leah was so independent, never needed anyone to worry about her. My father would clap me on the shoulder and praise my Hart resilience. But "independent" meant going to the doctor alone with a high fever, and "resilience" meant that after Evelyn broke my camera, I paid for a new lens with my weekend wages.

Before the spring formal, the student council awarded me one of only two senior spots at a New York media summer camp. That night Evelyn suddenly fainted in the bathroom. The doctor said it was only a panic attack. My mother sat by her bed and asked whether I could give Evelyn the spot. "She needs a fresh start." I refused, the first time.

The next morning at breakfast, Evelyn said she wouldn't go. She didn't want to damage our bond as sisters. My mother burst into tears on the spot, and my father slammed his fork down on his plate. In the end I signed the withdrawal form, and all I got for it was Evelyn's whisper against my ear. Thank you for proving, one more time, that they love me more.