I picked up my backpack from the chair.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
My name is Angela Adams. I am twenty-two years old, and for most of my life, my family treated me like the footnote to my brother’s headline.
Dylan was twenty-six, four years older, and perfect in the way families sometimes decide a child is perfect and then spend decades punishing everyone else for noticing the truth. He was charming, handsome, quick with words, and just humble enough in public to make people feel safe praising him. My parents, Mary and John Adams, adored him with the kind of devotion that should have embarrassed them but never did. They did not simply love Dylan. They believed in him. They invested in him. They built the family story around him, brick by brick, until every room in our Atlanta suburb home echoed with his importance.
Dylan was going places.
