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The gravy boat was the first thing that broke. It was my grandmother's — a white china thing with small blue flowers painted around the rim, the kind of heirloom that lived on the top shelf of my mother's hutch for fifty weeks a year and only came down at Christmas. My mother had been carrying it from the kitchen to the dining room when my cousin Casey, who is twenty-three and drinks like she's thirty-five, said the sentence that changed my life. I was thirty. I was sitting at a Christmas Eve dinner table with eleven members of my family. I was, if I am being honest, half-listening. And Casey, looking across the table at me while she refilled her wine, said: "It must be weird that you never got to meet your real dad." My mother dropped the gravy boat. The sound it made hitting the floor is a sound I will remember for the rest of my life.