I was maneuvered into it, by an expert, at the exact moment I was least able to resist.

And yet.

And yet I do not entirely regret it either, and this is the part that took me longest to understand.

Because underneath Fiona’s manipulation, the thing she was manipulating was real.

I did love that family, before it was mine, from the outside, the way an orphan loves the warm windows of other people’s houses.

I could not have lived with being the cause of Arthur Vance’s death, and that was not weakness; it was the one thing the system never managed to take from me, the stubborn, unkillable capacity to care about people who had never cared about me.