My uncle once asked me, ‘Are you a virgin?’ when I was already 27 years old. From that moment, I started to be afraid of him. And a few days later, when he took me to a hotel outside the city, he leaned close to my ear by the pool and whispered, ‘After the pool, come up to my room…’”

“I believe he hurt her. But I don’t know everything that happened between them.”

“Did you help him?”

His head lifted immediately.

“No.”

The answer came with such force that I stepped back.

Then his voice softened.

“I tried to stop him. That’s why he and I stopped speaking for nearly six years.”

I thought about all the family gatherings I remembered from childhood. The uncomfortable silences when Richard entered a room. The way my father sometimes looked at him with an expression I had mistaken for ordinary sibling rivalry.

Perhaps those silences had meant something else.

“Why did you never tell me?” I whispered.

“Because you were a child. Then you became a teenager, and your father was still alive. I thought telling you would hurt you without changing anything.”

“And after he died?”

Richard looked at me.

“After he died, I discovered that someone had been searching his old files. Someone who knew about Claire. Someone who knew about the hospital record.”