She knew that a new bride would rather swallow a mystery than start her marriage by accusing her mother-in-law of one, and she was right, and I hated, later, how right she’d been.

So I smiled back.

I made my face do the thing her face was doing.

And a cold understanding settled into me even as I smiled, which was that I had just been outplayed, in my own bedroom, by a woman who had been playing this game since before I was born.

Chapter 4 — The Stripped Sheets

I did not ask.