He had watered that bitterness patiently until it grew into something he could use.
And then he had started selling her what she needed to make me sick, for three thousand dollars a month.
She had paid for it, I learned, with the allowance money I gave her.
Every month, the generosity I’d extended to the woman I thought of as my mother had gone straight into the hands of a man plotting to destroy my family, to buy the thing that was slowly killing me.
Braddock had used my own kindness to Mireille as the doorway, and Mireille’s resentment as the key, and I had been paying for both without knowing it for five years.
That was the detail that stayed with me longest afterward — longer than the chapel, longer even than the warehouse.