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better appointed in almost every way—updated bathrooms, more generously proportioned rooms. Yet when Vonnie had come home for Christmas break, glum over her poor academic performance in her inaugural quarter at Northwestern, she had pitched a fit over her parents’ failure to consult her on this important family matter. Vonnie had always been given to histrionics, even when she had little cause for them, and her family was more or less inured to the melodrama.
    But no one, not even psychiatrist parents as well trained as theLerners, could have been prepared to hear their eldest daughter proclaim: “It’s just that everything’s going to be about Elizabeth—excuse me, Eliza —from now on.”
    The statement, delivered at the dinner table, was wrong on so many levels that no one in the family spoke for several seconds. It was factually wrong; the whole point was that the Lerners were trying to make a world in which things were neither about, nor not about, what had happened to Eliza. Besides, they had always been fair-minded, never favoring one daughter over the other, honoring their differences. Vonnie was their high-strung overachiever. Eliza, even when she was known as Elizabeth, was that unusual child content simply to be. Good enough grades, cheerful participation in group activities in which she neither distinguished nor embarrassed herself. Inevitably, it had been speculated—by outsiders, but also by Inez and Manny, by Vonnie, and even by Eliza—that her temperament wasn’t inborn but a subconscious and preternatural decision to opt out. Let Vonnie have the prizes and the honors, the whole world if she wanted it.
    From a young age, Eliza was also a willing, complacent slave to her older sister, which probably undercut whatever traditional sibling rivalry there might have been. She was simply too good-natured about the tortures her sister designed for her in their early days. Oh, when she was a baby, she cried when Vonnie pinched her, which the newly minted older sister did whenever the opportunity presented itself. But once Eliza could toddle about, she followed her sister everywhere, and not even Vonnie could hold a grudge against someone who so clearly worshipped her.
    But she could—apparently, amazingly—seethe with resentment over the way her sister’s misfortune had transformed the family dynamic.
    â€œWould you rather be Eliza?” her father asked Vonnie the night of her unthinkable pronouncement.
    Eliza couldn’t help wanting to hear the answer. Obviously,Vonnie had never wanted to be Eliza back when she was Elizabeth, so it would be odd to think she might want to trade places now. But what if she did? What would that signify?
    â€œThat’s not what I meant,” Vonnie said, her anger deflating. Imploding, really, from embarrassment. “I was just trying to say that, from now on, so much of what we do will be controlled, influenced, affected by…what happened.”
    â€œWell, that’s true for Eliza, so I think it’s fitting that it be true for our family as a whole,” their father said. “This happened to all of us. Not the same thing—there is what Eliza experienced, which is unique to her, and what your mother and I experienced, which is another. And what you felt, going off to school while this was happening, was yet another unique experience.”
    Manny was always careful to use the most neutral words possible— experienced, not suffered, or even endured . Not because he was inclined to euphemisms, but because Eliza’s parents didn’t want to define her life for her. “You get to be the expert on yourself,” her father said frequently, and Eliza found it an enormously comforting saying, an unexpected gift from two parents who had the knowledge, training, and history to be the expert on her, if they so chose. They probably did know her better than she knew herself in some ways, but they