They only gave me back the truth about it, and I was learning, that night, to tell the difference, and to want the second thing even when I could not have the first.

I think that is the lesson of the whole business, if it has one, and it is not the lesson I expected to be left with.

I had imagined, during the weeks of discovering all this, that the truth coming out would be a kind of restoration, that once everyone could see the dates the family would reorganize itself around the corrected facts and I would be returned to my proper place in it.

That is not what truth does, or not this kind of truth, inside a family.