“I always told myself they left,” he said, and his hands were shaking on the table.

“It was easier to believe I wasn’t worth staying for than to believe—” He couldn’t finish it.

He didn’t have to.

And I understood, watching him, that this was the cruelest part of the whole cruel arrangement — crueler even than whatever had actually happened to those two girls, if I can say such a thing.

Victoria had not only taken people out of Julian’s life.

She had let him believe, for twenty years, that they had chosen to go.