I was looking at the woman rising slowly from the far end of the table — an elegant older woman with Grayson’s own eyes, one hand pressed to her mouth, tears already standing in her eyes as she stared not at me but at the two children half-hidden against my side.

“Sloan?” Marguerite whispered.

She took a trembling step forward.

“You — you came.

After all these years, you finally decided to let us see the children?”

And there it was, spoken aloud, in front of everyone — the exact shape of the lie, from the other side of it.

She thought it had been me.

For eleven years, she had thought it had been me.