Your sister, Ellen
I have begun a great many letters to you in my head these four months and burned every one before it reached the paper, which is a thing I learned, I think, from a letter I once burned that I should have answered, and I am tired of burning things. So here is one I mean to send.
You sold me to clear your debts. I have loathed you for it with a completeness that frightened me, on the bad nights, and I am not going to pretend to you that I did not, because we have had a great deal of pretending between us and it has served neither of us at all.
You sold me. That is true and it will never cease being true.
And it is also true that you were one-and-twenty, and frightened, and drowning in what our father left you with no tools to swim in, and that you did the worst possible thing for what you persuaded yourself was a reason, the way frightened people do.
I have lately had cause to think a great deal about the harm that frightened people do to the people they are supposed to cherish and how certain they are, the whole time, that they are being kind.
I find I understand it better than I should like to.
I am not writing to forgive you. I have not yet got there, and I will not insult you with a forgiveness I do not feel, which would only be one more managed thing.
I am writing to tell you the truth, which is that I am alive, and well, and angry at a number of people of whom you are only one, and that I have stopped pretending you are erased from my regard because you are not, and the pretending was costing me more than the honesty would.
Do not ask me for money as I have none of my own to give and would not send it if I had, because money is the river you are drowning in and I will not add to it.
But if you are ever sober, and ever ashamed, and ever willing to be written to as a person and not as a creditor, you may write to me as one.
I will answer. That is the most I have, and it is more than I had a week past.
Your sister, Ellen