All of that was true.

But underneath the duty there had also been something less noble, which I had not let myself look at directly until Seraphina forced it into the light.

I had used the secrecy.

It had been convenient to have a locked room inside myself that my husband was not allowed to enter — a place where I did not have to be known, did not have to be soft, did not have to risk that the man I loved might look at the whole of me, the scar and the killing and the things I had seen, and flinch.

Kelvin had spent the last month half-believing a scheming woman’s story about me, and I had been furious at him for that.

But I understood, standing in the wreckage of that party with his jacket over my shoulders, that I had left a vacuum where the truth should have been, and that vacuums do not stay empty.