I knew what they would do to her, and I said them anyway, because I needed them to work.”

Irene did not forgive him.

Not then, not in that room, and Martha was fiercely glad that no one asked her to.

But something did happen, small and real: for the first time in months, Irene lifted her eyes and looked directly at her father while he spoke, and she did not flinch, and she did not hide her hands inside her sleeves.

She simply looked at him, steadily, the way you look at a thing you have at last understood the true shape of.