Just the two of us, far away from all of this.”

Far away.

That was the word that stayed with me after the candles were out.

A man who has forged your name onto four hundred thousand dollars of debt, who has locked you in a cellar over an electric bill, who is quietly stripping your consulting practice out from under you, now wants to carry you three thousand miles across an ocean to the one city on earth where the thing he has hidden for a decade is kept.

I lay awake a long time that night.