I had assumed the failure was mine.

It is a particular kind of vertigo, to feel a grief you thought was the truest thing in your life begin to tilt, and to wonder, for the first time, whether it had been engineered.

Chapter 7 — The Confrontation She Didn’t Expect

I let him come to me.

Two days later, when my “conference” was over and I came home, Desmond was waiting with a story already polished, and I let him tell all of it before I said a word.

He was so relieved by my calm that he mistook it for ignorance.