We had been family — and family, if it is worth anything at all, operates on a default of trust that a certain kind of person learns to read as an unlocked door.

The failure was never in our trusting.

The failure was entirely in the man who had studied that trust, mapped it, and walked through it with a forger’s patience.

Colton and I made each other a promise that night, without quite saying it out loud: that we would not let what Desmond did to our family curdle into a lifetime of suspecting everyone who came after him.

That would have been the last theft, the quiet one — to let him take our capacity to trust along with everything else.

We refused him that.