There was no strain in his voice, no hitch, no micro-hesitation of a man constructing a falsehood in real time.

The lie came out fully formed, worn smooth, because it was not really a lie to him anymore — it was a script, installed and rehearsed, the family’s official version of Yvaine, deployed so many times that it ran without conscious effort. She’s had emotional problems for years. How many people had heard that sentence and nodded sympathetically?

How many of the three hundred guests who would come to our wedding believed, right now, that poor unstable Yvaine was being generously cared for by a long-suffering family?

The Pembrooks had not only imprisoned her; they had, with sentences exactly like that one, pre-emptively discredited her, so that if she ever did speak, the world would already have been told she was mad.

It was a complete system.

The physical cage in the house, and around it a second cage made of reputation, built out of smooth sentences delivered at dinner parties.