Because there is a particular poison that betrayal leaves behind, and it is not the anger — the anger is clean, almost easy.

It is the shame.

The endless private interrogation of how did I not see it, the certainty that a sharper person, a less trusting person, a better person would have caught it years ago.

I had been drinking that poison since the bottom of my stairs, and so, I could see, had my brother.

And sitting at that table, each of us watching the other flinch under the same useless guilt, I finally understood how unearned it was.

We had not been stupid.