“No one knows what I sacrificed.

No one knows how hard it was to take in that child.” She had built her whole life on that mask — the put-upon aunt, the reluctant saint who had opened her home to an orphan — and she reached for it now because it was all she had.

But the numbers were on the record.

The injuries were on the record.

Her own voice, answering her dying sister, was on the record.