My parents threw me out at sixteen after I lost my leg. Nineteen years later they wanted a million dollars for my sister — to hide why a 24 -year-old woman may never walk again.

I remember waking up in that room afterwards. The light was wrong. Somebody was talking in the corridor.

I put my hand under the blanket.

And then I cried for my mother, the way you do when you are ten.

She came hours later.

She did not hug me. She did not sit down in the chair by the bed.

She stood at the foot of it, looking at the flat part of the sheet where my leg was not, and she said:

What are we supposed to do with you now?

I was ten years old.

And from that afternoon I stopped being her daughter and became the problem. The complication. The thing that had to be worked round.

My sister stayed at the centre of everything.