Sorrel was left with the debt and a criminal investigation, selling her things to start paying the people she’d defrauded.

And Wilhelmina had to sell her house before the bank foreclosed on it, and moved into a small worn-down apartment across town, and lost, at last, the position as family matriarch she had spent her whole life defending.

She never once apologized to Odalind.

Some people will lose the entire house before they’ll admit they set the fire.

That refusal fascinated me, in the end, more than it wounded me.

Wilhelmina lost everything — her home, her standing, the son she’d controlled, the story she’d told the world about her family — and even in the wreckage of all of it, she never turned toward me and said she was sorry, never once conceded that any part of the catastrophe traced back to her own choices.