Romy feels everything at full volume and will not be told a comfortable lie.
Delphie is four and believes the world is fundamentally good, and I would burn down anything that tried to teach her otherwise.
They are five whole people, not five copies of a man’s face, and the tragedy of that morning — one of the several tragedies of it — is that the crowd in that cemetery could only see the face.
I had not brought them to make a point.
I want that understood before any of the rest of it.
I had brought them because a good man had loved them from a great distance for the last two years of his life, and had died without once getting to hold them, and I was not going to let him go into the ground without the people he had loved standing there to say goodbye.
That the standing-there happened to detonate a decade of lies was not my design.
It was only what happens when you finally let the truth walk in the front door instead of keeping it, the way that family had, locked in a back room.
I had brought them to say goodbye to their grandfather, who was the only person on that entire estate who had ever, in eleven years, treated me like I was real.
Chapter 2 — Ten Years
My name is Sabra Cadwell.
It was Sabra Lockridge for eight years, and then a man gave me ten minutes in a walnut-paneled study to explain my whole life, and did not use them to listen, and I took my own name back and did not look behind me.
I had married Rhett Lockridge at twenty-four, a small-town girl marrying into one of the oldest fortunes in the state, and I had loved him in the uncomplicated way you love someone before you have learned what a person is willing to believe about you.
His family never warmed to me.