What they had actually stolen from her that night — before the six years, before the shed — was her own mind.

This is the part that took Sidonie longest to forgive, not in them but in herself: that for six years she had trusted the memory of a night she’d experienced through a deliberately poisoned haze.

She remembered the blood.

She remembered the stillness.

She remembered kneeling over a body that did not breathe.

And all of it was true as memory and false as fact, because they had arranged the scene precisely so that her senses would report a death that never happened and her tampered mind would never think to doubt the report.