“Tracy left,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“She took Leo back to her hometown.

Said she didn’t want my mother turning him into an heir.

Said she’d figured out she was never going to be treated as an equal in this family anyway.” And I felt, to my own surprise, a small flicker of something like sympathy for the woman in the red dress — not for what she’d done, but because she had finally seen, from the inside, the cage it had taken me ten years to find the door of.

“I hope Leo grows up okay,” I said, and I meant it.