Evelyn Sterling's life had become a performance of exquisite agony. She moved through her days at the gallery with her usual polished efficiency, fielded concerned calls from friends with gracious, pained dignity, and attended family dinners where the absence of a vibrant, yellow-clad presence was a deafening silence everyone pretended not to hear. She was hailed as the stalwart sister, the one who had weathered the scandal with class, the innocent victim of her sibling's shocking spiral.

The adulation was a crown of thorns. Every sympathetic murmur, every pitying glance, was a needle pressing deeper into her guilt. She saw the ghost of Lara in every corner of her childhood home, in the sunspot where she used to paint, in the echo of a laugh that no longer rang in the hallway. The single, forgotten glass lantern she'd found in the closet was now hidden in her own bedroom, a secret relic of the innocence she had helped destroy.