She was just the next person he’d handed a story to.

My enemy was the man who wrote the stories, and I was no longer interested in the people he’d deceived.

I was interested in the paper.

Chapter 10 — The Orchard

By then my life had grown far larger than his cruelty could reach into.

Cormac and I spent our evenings that autumn repairing his orchard, which had gone wild in the years since his wife died — apple and pear trees grown tangled and unpruned, heavy with fruit no one had gathered.