The particular loneliness I had worn like a second skin, the identity I had built entirely around being the girl nobody came for — all of it had been constructed on a false foundation, a crime disguised as an abandonment.

I was not who I had spent twenty-eight years believing I was.

And holding Rafferty, I understood that this was the true inheritance Lucinda had given me, larger than the trust or the tower or the name: she had given me back the first fact of myself.

I had been wanted from the beginning.

I had been loved before I could remember, and mourned when I was lost, and searched for without pause across three decades.

The girl who took up no space because she believed she had no right to any — that girl had been living inside a lie the whole time.