She had simply never been curious enough to learn the truth, and had filled the space where curiosity should have been with an easy, useful assumption: that her brother’s quiet wife was quiet because there was nothing underneath. You never asked. It was the gentlest possible version of an accusation, and also the most complete.

None of them had asked.

For eight years Lenore had sat at that family’s table, and not one of them — not Margery with her corrections, not Georgina with her phone, not Crispin with his myth — had ever once been curious about who she actually was, because incuriosity was comfortable and the truth might have required them to rearrange the hierarchy they all found so pleasant.

They had not conspired against her.

Conspiracy would have required them to take her seriously enough to plot.

They had merely agreed, silently and continuously, that she was furniture — and the discovery that the furniture owned the house was not, in the end, a betrayal she could be angry about.