I thought of the apple pancakes.

I thought of the father who walked me down the aisle.

I thought of the man who had traded his own freedom and his own name to build a fortress around a terrified four-year-old girl he owed nothing to.

There was a version of this moment, I suppose, in which I would have felt betrayed — in which the discovery that my whole life had been a constructed lie would have curdled into rage at the man who constructed it.

Some people would have felt that, and I do not think they would have been wrong to.

He had deceived me for twenty-four years.