I stood in that office with my own mother and a housekeeper and felt my heart going like something trapped, because I understood, without knowing the content yet, that whatever was coming was going to require something of me that fifteen years of practice had left me entirely unequipped to give.

And then she told me why Juliet Marsh had really come into our home.

And for the first time in my life — in a life that had taught me to expect betrayal from every direction, that had armored me against every kind of surprise — I discovered that there was something hidden inside my own family that all my money and all my power had never suspected, and could never have protected me from.

Chapter 8 — My Father’s Daughter