So, one at a time, they said the hard things out loud.
No one leapt up to hug anyone.
But it was the first meal that family had ever eaten built entirely on the truth, and that was worth more than comfort.
Ezra realized, sitting at that table, that the empty chair was doing something none of them had expected.
For his whole childhood, that family had run on a kind of managed silence — a smoothing-over, a keeping of the peace, a habit of not saying the hard thing so that dinner could stay pleasant.
And that habit, he saw now, was the exact soil Gideon’s deception had grown in.