My family left me behind during a summer trip as a vicious joke, laughing while they drove off and said, “Let’s see if she can handle it.”

There was none.

Richard told the police I had been unstable. Brooke’s video showed me shouting beside the car, but not the part where they drove away without me. My mother appeared on television crying and begging me to come home.

I watched her act from Ruth’s sofa.

Then I made the first real choice of my life.

I would not return.