I did not put my arms around him.
I wanted to — he was in real pain, and I loved him — but the trust between us was still broken, and pretending otherwise would only have been one more thing swept under a rug.
For ten years I had mistaken the absence of conflict for peace, and Lucien had mistaken looking away from his mother’s small cruelties for keeping the family together.
He had not poisoned my tea.
But his silence had built the house it happened in.
This is the part of the story that has no villain in it, and it was in some ways the hardest part to live through, because there was no one to arrest.