And one of the hired men repeated a thing Delilah had said to them, coldly, about what would happen if Vivienne simply refused to break: that a disgraced and isolated girl could not defend her inheritance from a hospital bed for very long.

When I heard those words read aloud, I understood, fully, how close I had come to finding my Vivienne not injured beneath that pine tree, but something far worse.

It was not only her land Delilah had been willing to take.

But I will not dwell there.

She lived.

That is the fact that matters.

What I could not stop turning over, though, was not the cruelty of the plan but the intimacy of it — because Delilah was not a stranger to Vivienne.

She was the woman who had made her breakfast for years.