I have argued with that voice for a long time, and I have mostly won, because the truth is that the deception was engineered by a man with every advantage: he knew everything about my life, he had our family’s trust already, and he was hiding behind the one face on earth I had no reason to doubt belonged to who it said it did.

To see through that would not have taken sharpness.

It would have taken paranoia, the willingness to suspect a grieving brother of an unthinkable crime, and I am not sorry that I was not, in those years, that kind of woman.

Trust is not a failing.

It was his crime to break it, not mine to have offered it.

Chapter 4 — The Brother Who Stayed

In the years after the crash, the man I knew as Sebastian did not push.