“He is their brother, Sybil.

And you should be ashamed of yourself for carrying your son’s madness into this house.” She said nothing.

She only looked at me, and looked at the baby, and let her silence do the accusing for her.

But it was the girls I was watching, not Sybil.

Ramona had gone still at her grandmother’s words — while they still think he’s their brother — and I could see her small face working to understand a sentence that had been engineered, cruelly, to be half over her head.

She knew something was wrong.