I just… I always felt like I had to be exceptional. Like anything less would be failing.”
“Mom and Dad never put that pressure on us,” I said, echoing Nathan’s earlier observation. “Didn’t they?” Hannah asked.
“Maybe not directly, but it was always there. The expectations. The subtle disappointment when we didn’t measure up.”
I sat beside her, maintaining a careful distance.
“I think we interpreted things very differently.”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “Or maybe they treated us differently. You were always the smart one.
The responsible one. I was the pretty one. The social one.
I felt like if I didn’t excel at something, I had no value.”
Her words surprised me. Hannah. Insecure.
It seemed impossible. Yet the vulnerability in her voice was unmistakable. “So you lied about your job,” I said gently.
“Nathan told me.”
She flinched. “He had no right.”
“Probably not,” I agreed. “But I understand why you did it.”
“Do you?” she asked bitterly.
“Miss perfect judge, who never needed validation.”
“I needed validation,” I corrected her. “I just stopped expecting it from family after a while.”
The silence between us was heavy. Unspoken hurts.
Unspoken misunderstandings. Finally, Hannah spoke again. “I’m not sure who I am if I’m not the successful one,” she admitted in a small voice.
“If I’m not exceptional—”
“You don’t have to be exceptional to be worthy, Hannah,” I said. “None of us do.”
She laughed humorlessly. “Says the youngest judge in fifty years.”
“That’s what I do,” I said.
“Not who I am.”
Hannah looked at me for a long moment. “When did you get so wise?”
“Probably around the same time you started pretending to be a marketing director,” I replied, allowing a small smile. To my surprise, she laughed.
A genuine laugh I hadn’t heard from her in years. For a moment, we were just sisters again. Without the competition.
Without the resentment. “I don’t know how to fix this,” she admitted. “With Nathan, with you, with everyone.”
“Maybe start with honesty,” I suggested.
“It’s worked out okay for me so far.”
She nodded slowly, then stood to leave. At the door, she turned back. “I am proud of you, Abby.
I always have been.”
“That’s part of the problem.”
After she left, I sat alone again. Wondering if this was the beginning of healing. Or simply a momentary truce in a lifetime of sibling rivalry.
Either way, the truth was finally out. And there was no going back to the way things had been before. The week following Hannah’s engagement party was a period of uncomfortable transition for the entire Matthews family.
My parents called daily, alternating between apologies for not recognizing my achievements and hurt questions about why I’d kept such important information from them. Extended family members sent congratulatory messages years too late, many including awkward acknowledgements of how they’d misunderstood my career. Hannah and I maintained a cautious distance, communicating primarily through brief text messages.
She was trying to salvage her relationship with Nathan, who remained troubled by the dynamics he’d witnessed at the engagement party. Ten days after the revelation, my mother called to invite me to Sunday dinner, a weekly tradition I’d been avoiding for months with work excuses. “Everyone will be there,” she said, a note of pleading in her voice.
“Hannah, Nathan, your father, and I. We need to talk as a family.”
I agreed reluctantly, knowing the conversation was necessary. Dreading it nonetheless.
Sunday arrived with a sense of foreboding. I dressed carefully in casual but professional attire. A subtle statement that this was who I truly was.
As I drove to my parents’ house, I rehearsed what I wanted to say. The boundaries I needed to establish. My father answered the door, embracing me awkwardly.
“Abby,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “Good to see you.”
The house smelled of my mother’s pot roast, her standard Sunday dinner fare. In the living room, my mother was arranging flowers while Hannah sat stiffly on the couch.
Nathan stood by the fireplace, looking uncomfortable but determined. “Aby’s here,” my father announced unnecessarily. My mother rushed over, hugging me tightly.
“We’re so glad you came,” she whispered. Hannah offered a tight smile, but didn’t rise. Nathan nodded respectfully.
“Judge Matthews.”
“Nathan, please,” I said. “We’re not in court. It’s just Abby.”
Dinner was a tense affair.
Conversation limited to safe topics like the weather and neighborhood news. Only after my mother’s apple pie was served did my father clear his throat significantly. “I think it’s time we cleared the air,” he said, looking around the table.
“As a family.”
My mother nodded in agreement. “We’ve all had time to process what happened at the engagement party.”
“I think we need to talk honestly about why things reached that point.”
Hannah set down her fork with a sharp clink. “Fine.
Let’s talk about how Abby deliberately humiliated me at my own engagement party.”
“Hannah,” Nathan warned quietly. “No, let’s be honest,” she continued. “You let everyone believe you were some struggling admin assistant for years, then dramatically revealed you’re actually a judge at my engagement party.
If that wasn’t calculated to steal my spotlight, I don’t know what is.”
“That’s not what happened,” I said evenly. “I never planned to reveal anything that night. You pushed and pushed, mocking my supposed career until I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Girls,” my mother interjected.
“This isn’t productive.”
“Actually, Elizabeth,” my father said, surprising everyone by using my mother’s first name at the dinner table, “I think they need to have this out. We all do.”
Hannah glared at me across the table. “You’ve always been jealous of me.”
I laughed incredulously.
“Jealous? Hannah? You’re the one who spent years putting me down to make yourself feel better.”
“Because you were always the smart one, the perfect one.
Why can’t you be more like Abby? Abby never gives us trouble. Abby always gets straight A’s.
Do you have any idea what it was like growing up in your shadow?”
Her words stunned me into silence. My parents looked equally shocked. “We never said those things,” my mother protested weakly.
“Maybe not in those exact words,” Hannah snapped, “but the message was clear. Abby was the good daughter. I was the problem.”
“That’s not true,” my father insisted.
“We’ve always been proud of both of you.”
“Really?” I asked, finding my voice. “Because from where I was standing, Hannah was always the star. My achievements were afterthoughts compared to hers.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Hannah scoffed.
“They threw a party when you got into Columbia. When I got into NYU, it was just, ‘That’s nice, dear.’”
“They threw a dinner, not a party,” I corrected. “And only after Aunt Susan suggested it.”
“When you got that marketing internship,” Hannah shot back, “Dad called everyone we knew.”
My parents looked back and forth between us, bewildered.
“We thought we were being fair,” my mother said softly. “Well, you weren’t,” Hannah and I said simultaneously. Then we stared at each other in surprise.
Nathan, who had been silent throughout this exchange, finally spoke. “It seems to me that you both felt overlooked. Just in different ways.”
The simple observation cut through the tension.
It made us all pause. “Is that possible?” my father asked, looking genuinely confused. “That we somehow made both of you feel like the less favored child?”
Hannah and I exchanged glances.
For the first time, I considered the possibility that my perception of our family dynamic might not be entirely accurate. Or at least might not be the only valid perspective. “I think,” Nathan said carefully, “that families develop patterns that aren’t always visible from within.
From an outsider’s perspective, it seems like Hannah and Abby both created narratives about their place in the family that may not reflect reality.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Hannah retorted. “You didn’t live it.”
“No,” he agreed. “But I’ve watched you compare yourself to everyone around you since the day we met.
Not just Abby, but friends, colleagues, strangers. Your self-worth seems tied to being better than others. And I’ve never understood why.”
Hannah’s face flushed.
“Isn’t it?” he challenged gently. “You lied about your job title, your responsibilities, even that promotion that never happened. Why, if not to seem more successful than you felt?”
My parents turned to Hannah in confusion.
“What promotion?” my mother asked. Hannah’s eyes filled with tears. “The director position I told you about at Christmas.
I didn’t get it. I’m still just an account manager.”
My father reached for her hand. “Hannah, why wouldn’t you tell us that?”
“Because I couldn’t bear to disappoint you,” she cried.
“Not when Abby was so perfect.”
“But I thought you were the favorite,” I said, genuinely confused. “And I thought you were,” she replied, equally perplexed. We stared at each other across the table.
The realization dawning. That perhaps we’d both been wrong. Or
