She had known it at the funeral, if she had been at the funeral.

She had known it every single day for ten years, while I raised a fatherless boy five miles from a truth she was keeping locked in a box three states away.

I did not yet understand why.

I did not yet understand what could possibly justify such a silence.

I was about to.

And I want to be fair to Sarah, even now, even with everything, because it would be easy to make her the second villain of this story and she was not.

She was a frightened woman who had been handed an impossible thing by a dying girl and had not been strong enough to carry it.