There was only something cold and settled and certain — a man who had been waiting to say this, who had perhaps been waiting the whole two years I’d known him.

From the doorway, my mother-in-law watched with a small, victorious smile.

I heard her murmur to him, low and satisfied, “You have to set the rules from day one.

If you don’t control her now, she’ll walk all over you.”

And there it was — the whole architecture of it, laid bare in a sentence.

Freya had not raised a cruel son by accident.