My name is Sophia Burke. I am thirty years old, and for most of my life I believed there were only two kinds of daughters in a family like mine.
There was the daughter people displayed.
And there was the daughter people used.
I had known which one I was long before the night at the Monarch, though I had never said it out loud, not even to myself. Some truths live in your body before they ever make it into language. They live in the way your shoulders tense when your phone lights up with your mother’s name. In the way you apologize before anyone has even accused you of anything. In the way you reach for your wallet without being asked because some ancient, invisible part of you has already learned that peace can be purchased, and in your family, somehow, the cashier is always you.
