He says you’ve been going through his private things, spreading lies, that you’re trying to blackmail this family for a divorce settlement.

How could you?” Even Sienna would not meet my eyes now — cowed, I understood, back into the family line by whatever her parents had said to her that afternoon, the old fear reasserting itself over the morning’s clarity.

I looked at the four of them, at the machine doing what it had always done: closing around Arthur, choosing the name over the truth, selecting the newest outsider as the thing to destroy so that everything else could stay clean.

“So that’s the story you’ve all agreed on,” I said quietly.