Every letter I sent from that prison had passed through her hands, and none of them had ever gone any further.

She had intercepted every one, while telling Flynn a different story entirely — that I had confessed because I was guilty, that I wanted nothing to do with him, that he should forget I had ever existed.

She had taken two people who loved each other, and built between us a wall five years thick, made of nothing but her lies, and she had stood on top of it, and prospered.

I have had to sit with the particular cruelty of that, because it is a subtler evil than the theft or the frame, and in some ways a worse one.

Fiona did not only take my freedom and my name.

She took something less tangible and more precious: she took the truth of my own story away from me, and away from Flynn, and replaced it, in each of our minds, with a lie perfectly designed to make us hate each other.