My name is Natalie Pierce, and in my family, love always came with a price tag attached.

I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, in a three-bedroom house on a quiet street that looked ordinary from the outside and operated, on the inside, according to rules that no one had written down because they didn’t need to. The rules were atmospheric — you absorbed them the way you absorbed the Texas heat, without being told it was happening, until one day you understood that this was simply the climate you lived in and you adjusted accordingly. The central rule, the one from which all others derived, was this: Brooke mattered more.

Not loudly. Not cruelly, in the way people imagine when they hear about family hierarchies. My parents weren’t monsters in the cartoonish sense. They were ordinary people who had made a subtle, sustained choice over many years to orient the family’s resources, attention, and emotional energy around my older sister, and who had arrived, through that sustained choice, at a worldview in which this arrangement was not favoritism but simply reality. Brooke was the sun. I was one of the planets. Planets don’t complain about their position. They orbit.