Adele pulled him closer, and Ingrid let out a short, dry laugh.

“Do you honestly think that man is going to show up?” she taunted.

“If your son has a father, where is he?”

It was, Adele would think later, the perfect distillation of her mother — the certainty that a woman alone was a woman defeated, that the absence of a man in the room meant the absence of any power in it.

Ingrid had spent her whole life measuring strength by who stood beside you, and had never once considered that a person might be dangerous entirely on her own.

Because here was what neither of her parents knew, sitting in that room so sure of their advantage.