Dear Prudence,
I just came out of a toxic divorce. I messed around online and found out my 23-year-old stepsister has several profiles on “sugar daddy” websites. She still lives with our parents and has college loans. My mom thinks she does web design. In the most awkward email of my life, I told her she needs to clean her accounts and come up with an alias. This will haunt her later in life and ruin her reputation now, plus it will kill our parents. She never responded but her accounts vanished.
I tried to get back in the dating game but realized I have too much baggage. I want sex, but I don’t have the emotional capacity to commit to anyone. I emailed my stepsister and asked her if she had any “friends” she could recommend for a short-term sugar daddy situation. She called me a pervert and went on a ludicrous rant about my character. I told her not to be coy—she was selling sex. She doesn’t get the high moral ground here. She threatened to tell her father; I told her I would be there with popcorn. I told her that I don’t think what she was doing was “shameful” but neither was me asking about it. She cursed me out and then blocked me. Now our parents are wondering about the rift. I have told them to ask my stepsister. We didn’t grow up together, but I thought we had a fairly civil relationship. What is my next move here?
—My Sister’s Keeper