My parents threw me out at sixteen because I had one leg.

The Federal Correctional Facility in Danbury was a gray, concrete fortress designed to strip humanity down to numbers and barcodes.

Three weeks had passed since the foreclosure. Tamson’s bail reduction had been denied on grounds of flight risk, after prosecutors discovered she had transferred fifty thousand dollars to an offshore bank account in Belize forty-eight hours before her arrest.

She was locked in holding, awaiting the formal start of her criminal trial.

I hadn't planned on visiting her. But Marcus had received a formal request from the federal public defender’s office. Tamson had refused to speak to her court-appointed lawyers until she saw me.

I sat in the small, glass-partitioned visitation cubicle. The air smelled of industrial bleach, floor wax, and misery.

The heavy steel door on the opposite side clicked open. A corrections officer escorted Tamson inside.

The transformation was shocking.

The golden-haired, pristine debutante who had sneered at me in my office was gone. Her hair was pulled back into a messy, dull ponytail, unwashed and stringy. She wore an ill-fitting orange jumpsuit that swallowed her slender frame. The lack of luxury cosmetics revealed deep, dark hollows beneath her bloodshot eyes, and her fingernails were chewed down to the quick.

She sat down heavily on the metal stool, picked up the plastic telephone receiver, and slammed it against her ear.

I lifted mine.

“Are you satisfied?” Tamson asked. Her voice was scratchy, cracked from days of crying. “You got what you wanted. Brooks dumped me. His family hates me. Mom and Dad are living in a run-down motel off Route 9, living off food stamps and Dad’s tiny pension. And I’m in an orange jumpsuit eating gray oatmeal with plastic spoons. Are you happy, Rose?”

“I don't feel happiness looking at you, Tamson,” I said honestly. “I feel nothing.”

Tamson let out a sharp, hysterical laugh that echoed off the cinderblock walls. “Nothing? You’ve hated me since the day you lost that leg! You hated me because I could dance and you couldn't! You hated me because Mom loved me more!”

I leaned forward slightly, resting my forearm on the stainless-steel counter.

“Mom didn't love you, Tamson. Mom used you.”

Tamson froze, her mouth hanging open.

“Think about it,” I continued, my voice calm, clinical, and undeniable. “Did she ever ask you what you actually wanted to be? Did she care about your passions, your intellect, your dreams? No. You were her doll. She dressed you up, paraded you in front of country-club judges, and pushed you into Brooks Callaway’s arms so she could maintain her social standing. The moment you got into trouble, what did they do? Did they sell their own jewelry? Did they liquidate their country club memberships? No. They tried to steal another million dollars from me.”

Tamson’s eyes flickered with a desperate, wild defensiveness. “They tried to save me!”

“They tried to save *themselves* from the scandal,” I corrected. “And when that failed, Sterling offered to testify against you in exchange for living in the guest house of the property I foreclosed on.”

Tamson flinched as if I had struck her across the face. “You’re lying.”

“Ask Marcus. The conversation was recorded by building surveillance,” I said quietly. “Our parents don't love anyone, Tamson. They never loved me because I was broken, and they never loved you because they only valued what you could reflect back onto them. You were just a mirror for their vanity.”

Tears welled up in Tamson’s eyes, spilling over her pale, blotched cheeks. She gripped the plastic phone receiver so tightly her knuckles turned white.

“I didn't mean to hit that girl,” she whispered, her voice breaking into real, unvarnished terror. “I was scared, Rose. Brooks was going to propose that weekend. If the police arrested me for a DUI, everything was over. The wedding, the house, the life I worked my whole life for... I panicked.”

“And in your panic, you left a human being trapped in a crushed car to bleed out,” I said, my heart hardening again. “You spent one million dollars stolen from a charity to hire corrupt investigators to stalk her. That wasn't panic, Tamson. That was callous, premeditated cruelty.”

“What am I going to do?” she sobbed, burying her face in her free hand. “The lawyers say the minimum sentence is seven years. Seven years, Rose! I’ll be thirty-two when I get out! My life will be over!”

“Your life won’t be over,” I said. “You’ll be thirty-two. Exactly the age I was when I closed my first thirty-million-dollar commercial development deal. The difference is, when you get out, you’ll have two working legs and a clean slate, if you choose to take it.”

Tamson looked up, her tear-stained face searching mine for any sign of soft sentimentality. “Will you help me? Will you pay for a private defense lawyer? Just someone who can get the sentence down to house arrest?”

I looked at my sister. The sister who had sat on the living room sofa nineteen years ago, admiring her freshly manicured nails while our father threw a black trash bag at my chest and pushed me into the snow.

“No,” I answered.

Tamson’s breath hitched. “Why?”

“Because the only thing that ever saved my life was being forced to carry my own weight,” I told her. “As long as someone bails you out, Tamson, you will remain the hollow, vicious thing our mother built. Serve your time. Eat the oatmeal. Clean the floors. Learn what a day of honest work feels like. Maybe when you walk out of those gates in seven years, you’ll finally become a real person.”

I hung up the receiver.

Tamson slammed her hands against the reinforced glass, screaming something I couldn't hear through the barrier.