He did not hide it from me, because he did not consider me anyone at all.

The quiet sister in the reports department, the soft one, the sensitive one, the one who would never amount to anything, was, in his mind, a piece of the furniture, no more capable of understanding what she was looking at than the desk she sat behind.

And so he was careless in front of me.

He left things where I could find them.

He assumed, because everyone in the family assumed, that I lacked the intelligence and the nerve to follow a trail that led to him.