I stood there holding a forged document that erased me from my own family’s future, signed by my father’s own brother, and I understood that the plot was not two people wide.

It was a family.

It had always been a family, and I had been the only one in it who didn’t know.

My uncle Horace had come to my wedding.

He had given a toast, a warm and rambling one, about how glad he was to see me settled with a man who would take such good care of me.

I had believed every word of it and been moved by it, and now I understood that he had already, by then, been talking with Devon about a fortune and a signature and a woman who would need to be managed.