Of all the families in the world, Julian had chosen to run this particular crime in the one family that contained a person whose entire life was dedicated to stopping it.

It would be almost funny if it were not so grievous.

But I have thought about why he never saw it, and the answer is not that he was stupid; Julian was many terrible things but he was not stupid.

The answer is that he had spent his whole life not really looking at me.

To Julian I had always been a fixed quantity, the little sister, the one who’d gone off and done something with the government that he’d decided, long ago and without inquiry, was small and self-important and beneath real notice.

He had a story about who I was, and the story was convenient, and he had never once updated it against reality, because updating it would have required being curious about someone other than himself, and that was a thing my brother could not do.