Then I looked across the room at Kelsey.

Whatever my mother had been guarding for six years, my father had known enough to leave her the responsibility of confessing it.

The question was no longer whether Beatrice Farrington had withheld the truth.

The question was why my father had trusted her to tell it — and why, three years after his death, she still hadn’t.

Part Three

By ten the next morning my mother was already waiting in the library.

That detail alone told me how badly she was rattled.