Not because I was stupid — I know now that I was never stupid, that stupidity had nothing to do with it.

I explained it away because I had been trained to.

Fifteen years of being told I didn’t understand things had taught me to distrust my own perception as a reflex; whenever something looked wrong, some deep worn groove in me smoothed it over automatically, supplied the innocent reading, told me I was imagining it or overreacting or failing to grasp the sophisticated truth.

Lachlan had not just controlled the money and the house.

He had, slowly, over fifteen years, installed a governor on my own mind that kept me from believing what I saw — and it had worked so well that when my own child began behaving like a boy in danger, and my own husband began behaving like a man with something to hide, the governor kicked in and filed both under nothing to worry about. Learning to override it, in that basement, was the hardest and most important thing I did.

Every instinct I’d spent fifteen years being taught to ignore, I now had to learn to trust again, fast, because my son’s life had come to depend on his mother believing her own eyes.