It is the last manipulation of the guilty, the attempt to transfer the moral weight of their own choices onto the shoulders of the one who merely stopped covering for them.

I carried a great many burdens that my family put on me over twenty-eight years.

But I set that one down for good on a hospital balcony, and I have never picked it up again: the collapse of a corrupt empire is the fault of the ones who corrupted it, and never, ever, the fault of the one who finally told the truth.

Julian smiled, his dark eyes brimming with a fierce pride.