I grew up in a two-story house in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. Four bedrooms. Two bathrooms. A small front yard edged with rose bushes my mother had planted the year Victoria was born.
From the street, we looked like the kind of family people envied. From inside the walls, I learned what it meant to disappear.
My father, Robert Harrison, ran a construction supply store on the east side of town. He made sixty-five thousand dollars a year. Not rich. Not poor. Comfortable enough to complain about money when it was useful and spend it freely when it suited him.
My mother, Sandra, worked part-time as a bookkeeper. Most of her real energy went somewhere else entirely: Victoria’s clothes, Victoria’s activities, Victoria’s photos, Victoria’s moods, Victoria’s future.
And then there was me.
Victoria was two years younger than I was. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. The kind of smile that made people pause when she entered a room. She moved through life with the ease of someone who had always been told the world would make room for her.
In our house, it did.
I had brown hair, brown eyes, and a quiet voice that people tended to speak over. I learned early that silence was safer than disappointment.
The first time I understood something was wrong, I was eight.
I stood in the hallway one evening counting the photographs on the wall. There were forty-seven frames in total. Victoria appeared in forty-three of them. Baby Victoria. Toddler Victoria. Victoria at ballet. Victoria at the beach. Victoria in a princess costume. Victoria blowing out birthday candles. Victoria smiling through every season of her life.
I appeared in four.
In two of those four, I had been cropped halfway out, as if I had wandered by accident into the edge of someone else’s life.
