I had learned, over many years of dealing with Victoria, that the worst thing you could do was let her hear the impact. She fed on it. She had been feeding on my reactions since the day she married my father, collecting them the way some people collect grievances, storing them for future use. So I stood at the window and watched a plane draw a slow white line across the pink sky and let the words arrive without flinching.
“I’ve changed all the locks,” she repeated, as if she wanted to make certain I had fully absorbed each one. “Don’t even think about trying to get in. You did this to yourself. You ruined Lily’s graduation party, and now you’re going to live with the consequences.”
The graduation party I had not been invited to. The one I had found out about through social media photographs three days after the fact, scrolling through images of balloons and streamers and my father and Victoria flanking Lily beneath a banner that read CONGRATS, LILY, WE’RE SO PROUD OF YOU, their faces arranged in the particular expression of people who are being photographed and know it.
“The party,” I said, “that you specifically didn’t invite me to?”
She scoffed. “Oh, please.”
“The one where you told everyone I was too busy to attend?”
“Don’t play the victim, Alexandra. It doesn’t suit you. Everyone knows you’re jealous of Lily’s success. And now you’ll never set foot in that beach house again. I’ve made sure of it.”
There it was: jealous. It had been her preferred label for me since the beginning, not because it was accurate, but because it was efficient. It explained away every complaint, every boundary, every instance of me simply wanting to be treated as though I existed. Jealousy was a story she could tell about me that required no further examination.
