That is the part I cannot forgive myself for easily.

I had noticed, and each time Vanessa had offered a gentle, reasonable explanation, and each time I had accepted it, because accepting it was easier than the alternative, which was to believe that the woman I was going to marry was quietly assassinating the character of a woman who had helped raise me.

This is how it is done, I have learned.

Not with a single lie big enough to be caught, but with a hundred small ones too minor to bother challenging, until the accumulated weight of them has quietly convicted an innocent person in everyone’s mind.