And I did know.

That was the strange thing.

Every instrument I had for detecting a lie was quiet.

She had not known.

She had walked into my house carrying nothing but grief and curiosity and a dead woman’s shame, and my father had made her, without her knowledge or consent, the keeper of my entire fate.

And she had done it, in the months she held that unknowing power, by sitting up with my mother in the dark and learning which tea to bring.

If she had been the schemer my instincts kept insisting she must be, she had chosen the strangest possible way to press her advantage, which was to make no move at all, to ask for nothing, to love a dying woman who could do nothing for her and to say not one word about the fortune sleeping under a house two hundred miles away.