She had known enough of whatever Luke and Camellia were doing to want Brucie somewhere safe, somewhere far from the center of it — but not enough decency, or not enough courage, to pick up the phone and tell me what was actually being planned, or to call the police, or to do any of the ten things a person of even minimal conscience would have done.

She had chosen, instead, the coward’s exact middle path: to protect my daughter quietly, with a vague text, while doing nothing at all to protect the other child, or to stop her son, or to warn me of the truth.

It is the kind of half-mercy that lets a person tell themselves afterward that they tried — I told her to take the girl away, didn’t I? — while the whole time knowing that they did the smallest possible thing that would let them keep their conscience and their comfort both.

I did not know, in the corridor, everything her text meant.

But I knew, from that moment, that Celina’s hands were not clean, that her grief for her son was going to turn out to be grief for a plan that had gone wrong rather than shock at a plan she had never imagined, and that the whole rotten architecture of this family went deeper and further than one man and one terrible afternoon.

Chapter 6 — This Is Your Fault