Odette read that need the way a locksmith reads a lock.

She didn’t force anything.

She simply supplied, in careful daily doses, exactly the thing the old woman was starving for, and let the hunger do the rest.\n\nBecause in the story Odette told — the story Rosalind wanted so badly to believe that she stopped checking it — Theo was Vaughn’s son.

The child of the affair, yes, which was a scandal, but scandals could be managed, and blood was blood, and Rosalind had spent her whole life believing that blood decided everything.

A grandson meant the line continued.