I was wrong, of course.

Samantha grasped it perfectly.

She simply understood something I had not yet arrived at, which was that a lie kept at a distance can never be defeated, only avoided, and that avoidance is its own kind of prison.

She was not being reckless.

She was choosing, at last, to end a thing that avoidance had let fester for fifteen years, and she had understood, in a way I had not, that the only way to end it was to let it come all the way into the open, where the truth could finally meet it.

Chapter 8 — It’s Time the Truth Protected You