Both, I would come to understand.

The empty grave was a theft — twenty-four years of a mother stolen from me — and it was also, at the very same time, the thing that had kept me alive, because a family hunting a living woman stops hunting a dead one.

I stood on that porch holding both truths at once, the cruelty and the mercy fused into a single unbearable fact, and I understood that this was going to be the shape of everything I learned tonight: that the worst things done to me and the most loving things done for me were going to turn out to be exactly the same things.

Chapter 8 — The Second Figure

Inside the house, a second figure stepped into the warm glow of the foyer — an older woman carrying a thick, faded leather binder.

It was Prudence Renforth, Clement’s estranged older sister, whom I had been told died in a car accident before I was even born.