Here’s a rewritten version that keeps the same meaning: “You’re nothing like your sister,” my mom remarked at dinner. I pushed my chair away from the table and replied, “Then she can start covering your rent.” My dad went pale. “Rent? What rent?”

Forks froze in mid-air. The clinking of silverware ceased instantly. My father went pale, his skin taking on the waxen quality of the candles flickering on the sideboard.

“Rent?” he whispered, the word escaping him like a gasp for air. “What rent?” He looked around the room as if the walls might collapse, as if the truth might swallow him whole.

But that moment—the shock, the suffocating silence, the raw fear in his eyes—was nothing compared to what came after. Because the real secret, the one that had been eating me alive from the inside out, hadn’t even been revealed yet.

My name is Nora Ellis, and for most of my life, I have been a ghost in my own family. I am the background noise, the static between the clear, broadcast stations of my parents’ adoration for my sister. People often assume I’m shy, retiring, perhaps a bit dull. But that isn’t quite true. I just learned early, with the brutal efficiency of a survivalist, that in my parents’ house, silence keeps the peace. And peace, no matter how fragile, how glass-thin, was the only thing I ever tried to protect.

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