I had decided, years before, back when the twins were small and I was so tired I could barely see, that whatever else I failed at, I would not raise my children inside a lie the way their father’s whole family lived inside one.

I would tell them the truth in the size they could hold at each age, and never make them keep a secret to protect an adult’s comfort.

It had worked; it had made them into people with a plain moral clarity that sometimes startled other parents and always made me proud.

But it also meant that when a beautiful, cruel woman stood in front of my daughter and announced that the grandfather she had come to mourn was not her family, Romy did not do the thing a child raised on secrets does, which is look to her mother and wait to be told what was safe to say.

She simply told the truth, because the truth was the only currency she had ever been given, and she spent it without fear.