The same woman held both truths without strain, which is a kind of monstrousness far more frightening than plain hatred.

Plain hatred I could have sensed, over ten years.

What I could not sense was a tenderness that was completely real and completely conditional — love with a bloodline clause, care that would kill you the instant you fell outside the family tree.

In that one slipped second, protecting my daughter while poisoning me, Ottoline showed me the true architecture of her heart, and I understood that I had never once, in ten years, actually been inside it.

Chapter 9 — Lukewarm

She stammered that the tea was much too hot for a child.