Easter dinner at the Keller estate had never really been about Easter.
It was about appearances.
My mother called it tradition because tradition sounded warmer than performance.
Every spring, the dining room was dressed in white linen, fresh tulips, polished silver, and the kind of careful seating chart that made love look like a corporate merger.
Nobody sat anywhere by accident.
Nobody spoke out of turn unless they had earned the right by making enough money, marrying enough money, or pretending convincingly enough that they had never needed money at all.
Katherine was very good at the pretending part.
She was my older sister by four years, and for most of our lives she had treated birth order like a title deed.
She got the center bedroom when we were children.
She got my father’s attention when we were teenagers.
She got my mother’s defense whenever she went too far and someone else was expected to call it personality.
I got the habit of watching before speaking.
That habit saved me more times than anyone in that house ever knew.
By the time I was thirty-two, my family had built a story around me that suited them.
Jocelyn was the quiet one.
Jocelyn was the divorced one.
Jocelyn did consulting, whatever that meant.
Jocelyn drove a practical car and did not talk about clients at dinner, which meant the clients could not have mattered much.
They never asked better questions, and I stopped offering better answers.
My daughter Clara was five that Easter.
She had spent the morning choosing between two ribbons for her hair, holding each one against her pale blue dress and asking which made her look more like spring.
I told her both did.
She chose white.
In the car, with her small patent shoes tapping lightly against the back of the passenger seat, she asked me if Aunt Katherine would be nice.
It was the kind of question children ask when they already know the answer but want an adult to make the world safer.
