We walked another loop of the garden before Sienna spoke again, and this time when she did, her voice had lost the last of its performance.
"I used to watch you at the dinner table," she said, "when we were children. You would eat exactly enough to not be noticed and nothing more. I thought it made you weak. I understand now it was the opposite. You had already learned how to survive a house that did not want you, and I had not learned anything at all, because I was never required to."
I said nothing. I had learned, over the past weeks, that Sienna talked most honestly when she was allowed to talk without interruption, the way a wound bleeds most cleanly when no one is pressing on it.
"You think I am here because someone sent me," she said. "You are not wrong. I was invited, and I came
