They were not searching for a dead woman and a grieving stepfather, because those two people were not running from anything; they were just another small family absorbing an ordinary loss.

Clement had understood that the safest lie is the one nobody wants to examine, and he had built my entire childhood out of exactly that — a grief so believable and so common that it hid us in plain sight for twenty-four years.

Chapter 13 — From Afar

“He raised you.

He protected you.

He gave you a normal, beautiful life,” Philippa wept.