“Your mother wanted nothing to do with that family ever again.”
“So everyone just… stopped talking about them?”
“Yes.”
“Even to me?”
“You were four, Claire.”
“I grew up.”
“I know.”
Anger began pushing through my shock.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Grandpa looked at me helplessly.
“Because your mother asked me not to.”
“And after she died?”
“I thought keeping Richard away from you was what she would have wanted.”
I stared at him.
Then down at Ivy.
“When Julian disappeared after I told him I was pregnant, you thought—”
“That he had become exactly like his father.”
