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There's a version of Monarch I carry in memory and a version the press has been building for the last several years, and the distance between the two is one of the things I've been turning over on this journey.

The one I remember: the person who argued with the father. Not loudly, not dramatically — Monarch didn't tend toward drama — but consistently, and on behalf of people who weren't in a position to argue for themselves. When someone was being handled too harshly, when the clinical machinery of the household ground down on someone in a way that went beyond what was necessary, Monarch would say something. Not always the right something, not always effectively, but the saying itself was the point. He saw it and he named it and he did that in a house where ignoring it was considerably safer and easier.

That's not a small thing. I want to be clear about that. I've spent years in the world outside and I understand now, more than I did then, how rare it is — the willingness to be inconvenient on someone else's behalf. Most people don't. Most people calculate the cost and decide the math doesn't work out. Monarch just did it, as a matter of course, the way you do things that are simply part of who you are.

The press version: embittered, sharp-edged, a difficult personality added to a team that was losing members. I've read those pieces with the specific skepticism of someone who knows what that house does to people and how it does it. The hardening is real, I don't doubt it — you don't spend years in that environment and come out without some kind of defensive architecture. But I've seen the press misread siblings before, mistake adaptation for character, mistake armour for the person wearing it.

I don't know which version I'm going to find. Probably neither cleanly — probably something that contains both, the memory and the intervening years sitting in the same person waiting to be navigated.

The silk threads. I've seen photographs but photographs don't capture the quality of the glow. I remember it from childhood — that specific luminescence in dark corridors — and I find I'm looking forward to seeing it again in a way that has nothing to do with anything complicated.

Some things are just good to see.