That was the whole point of him.

Chapter 4 — Three Years of Small Cuts

None of it was ever one big thing.

That is what made it so hard to name, and so hard to fight, and so effective.

It was three years of small cuts, each one shallow enough to seem like nothing, each one placed with care.

There was the family portrait, two summers back, that hung in Gene’s hallway — the professional one, everyone in coordinated blue — from which Holly had simply, somehow, been cropped, so that she stood at the very edge, half of her shoulder showing, easy to mistake for a stranger who’d wandered into the shot.

There were the holidays where the cousins ate at the big table and Holly was placed at “the kids’ table,” except the kids’ table was Holly, alone, because the cousins were teenagers who ate with the adults.