My grandfather understood this about them long before I did.

It is why he never tried to buy their love either.

He simply, quietly, kept the receipts.

Chapter 3 — Grandpa’s Silence

His name was Walter Palmer, and he was, for the whole of my life, the one person in my family who ever looked at me and actually saw me.

“When people think silence means weakness, Fiona,” he told me once, the two of us sitting on his porch watching a summer storm come in over the lake, “let them keep thinking it.