But underneath the grief was something harder and clearer, and it surprised me: relief.

Because I had carried that secret alone for four years, held it high on its shelf every single day, and there is an exhaustion to a lie that protects someone, a low constant weight you stop noticing only because it never lifts.

And now it was down.

The worst had happened, the wall was rubble, and Samantha was going to know all of it — and somewhere under the fear of what she’d think, I felt the strange lightness of a man who will never again have to hide the largest thing about himself from the person he sleeps beside.

Rosalind had meant to expose me as a weapon.