My mother had to surrender her name and her face and everything she had been, and vanish into a new identity and a life of total secrecy.

And Clement legally adopted me — a widowed stepfather with a motherless little girl, the most ordinary and unremarkable thing in the world.

He hid me in plain sight.

The best place to hide a child a powerful family is hunting is behind a grief so common no one looks at it twice.

I sat at that dining table and tried to grasp the sheer scale of what had been undone and rebuilt to make my childhood.

An entire death had been manufactured — records, a certificate, a funeral, a grave — a whole apparatus of loss constructed with such care that no one ever questioned it, least of all me.