We named them Wren and Jasper.

Cassian sent one letter from prison, some months after the twins were born, asking whether the children were truly Cormac’s.

I turned it over in my hand, and I recognized the tidy handwriting, and I understood that even now, even from a cell, he was reaching for the one weapon that had always worked on me — the doubt, the accusation, the quiet suggestion that the failure might, after all, be mine.

I returned the letter unopened.

The answer to his question was sleeping against my husband’s chest as the sunset turned the fields to gold, and it was none of his business, and it never would be again.

He had spent six years teaching me that some envelopes are better left sealed and some are the whole case; I had simply learned, at last, to tell them apart.