At the doors Percival looked back at me one last time.

“I really did love you, Sunniva.”

I felt a small sorrow — not for the man in handcuffs, but for the man I had believed he was.

“Loving someone isn’t trying to make them your property,” I said, and he was gone.

That was the last thing I ever said to Percival Pembrook, and I chose it deliberately, because it was the truest single sentence I could give him on his way out the door — the whole error of him, and of his family, distilled to one line.

They had never learned the difference between loving a thing and owning it.