She had, in the end, saved my life and my children’s — the swapped page, the message to Marcus, the whole quiet resistance she had run from inside Victor’s trap.

And also, for weeks, she had known that the man I slept beside every night was dangerous, and had said nothing directly to me, and had let me go on lying down next to him.

Both of those things were true, and I refused to pretend the second one away just because the first one was heroic.

“You should have told me directly, Rachel,” I said to her, once, in the hard early weeks.

“I tried, Clara,” she wept.