My mother had spent her life turning private things into performances, weaponizing what people confided and staging what should have stayed quiet.

I was not going to inherit that from her.

Fergus never needed to hear the rest of the recording, and I never described it to him.

He knew the shape of what his mother had done; he did not need the transcript to carry for the rest of his life.

Protecting him from the details was the first decision I made as his sister that felt like something my father would have done.

Chapter 14 — The Right Thing