“Back then?

All these years?” “Because Gemma asked me not to,” he said simply.

“She said if you knew, you would go to complete war with your parents, and that the whole family would be destroyed.

She wanted to protect you from it, Nora.

She wanted to protect all of us.

So I kept the secret, for her, for years, until tonight, when she made me promise that if things went wrong, you would finally know.

That detail undid me more than any other, and it still does: that my sister, learning the depth of her own family’s betrayal, learning that her own parents had tried to pay her away, had responded not with the desire for revenge or even for justice, but with the desire to protect the rest of us from the pain of knowing.