Those aren’t the same thing.

My father spent his whole life teaching me the difference and never once knew he was doing it.” He put his face in his hands again.

And I understood, watching him, that Matthias was not only learning that his father had betrayed a woman and abandoned a child.

He was learning where his own worst instinct came from — the reflex to protect the appearance of a thing over the truth of it, the reflex that had made him choose a birthmark over his wife and containment over honesty.

It had a source, and the source was sitting in a photograph on Fabian’s table, and it had a name, and the name was the one thing Bertram Selwyn had actually managed to pass down.

Asher slept through the whole of it, in my arms, warm and heavy and entirely unbothered, the newest Selwyn man, carrying on his small back the mark that had just brought the whole hidden history down.