“My girls just light up the room,” my mother used to say proudly.

She wasn’t wrong. Rooms did seem to glow around them. They glowed so brightly, in fact, that shadows like me disappeared entirely.

I was the opposite of them—quiet, observant, a girl who preferred reading case studies over attending slumber parties, who asked for library cards instead of hair curlers. My seriousness was treated as a flaw, something that disrupted the Monroe family’s glossy image.

“Ava is just… intense,” my mother would say with a stiff smile, as though my existence required an apology.

I learned early that in our house, brightness was currency, and I did not possess the right kind.

Holidays made the hierarchy even clearer.