It had been the overflow of her own buried crime — the resentment of a woman forced to raise, in daily view, the evidence of the man she had ruined her life for.

I had been cold to my whole life not because I was unlovable, but because I was, to Paulina Marsden, a walking accusation.

There is a grief in learning that, and there is also a strange, late, enormous relief.

It was never me.

It was never me.

I said it to myself that night until I began, for the first time, to believe it.