I had simply been the last to see it.

That, more than anything, was the humbling of it.

The people who worked in my home had understood what Vanessa was long before I did; they had felt the cold current under the charm, had watched her pick them off one by one, had known, in the way that people without power always have to know the moods of the powerful, exactly how much danger she represented.

The only person in the whole household who had not seen it clearly was the one with the most power to stop it, which was me.