My mother covered her face and sobbed.

My father simply stood there, frozen, staring at nothing, a man watching the monster he had made get led out of a building.

Chapter 14 — Endurance Over Love

Julian went down onto his knees right there in the corridor, his head in his hands, as the full shape of what he’d believed and what he’d thrown away closed over him.

Cassie stood beside him with the baby, crying without a sound, understanding at last that the golden life Victoria had promised her had only ever been a crime with a nursery attached.

I felt, looking at her, none of the vindication I’d once imagined I would. She had a newborn in her arms and a future that had just turned to ash in a hospital corridor, and she had been, in her own smaller way, played by the same hand that played me.

Whatever came next for her — and it would not be easy — she was going to have to raise that child inside the wreckage of a story she’d never known she was in.