An hour earlier, in the church, most of these same people had looked at me as the villain of the piece — the grasping sister, the one who had somehow tricked a dying man and now stood accused, with the golden son’s fist mark on her face as though it were evidence against her. Grief really does make people careless, my father had said, and it makes them credulous too; they had been so ready to believe Leon, because believing Leon required nothing of them and believing me would have required them to reconsider a story they had told themselves for twenty years.

And now, in the space of one opened safe, the story had simply collapsed, and they could not meet my eyes — not out of shame for what Leon had done, but out of shame for how easily they had been prepared to hand me over to him.

I did not enjoy their discomfort.

But I did not rush to relieve it, either.

Some reckonings a person should be allowed to sit inside for a moment.

Chapter 15 — Mercy for Permission