“That is the part you may find hardest to believe, but it is the heart of the whole thing.

Julian did not come to you a stranger, Evelyn.

He had been watching your life from a distance for twenty years, as closely as he safely could.

He knew what kind of woman you had become.

He knew how proud you were.

And above all, he knew exactly how much pain you carried about your father, the man you believed had abandoned you before you were born.

He knew that wound better than anyone alive, because he was the one it had been carved around.”