Whatever else happened, I never took his money, and I never did what he told me to do.

My eighteen-year-old daughter, alone, pregnant, threatened by one of the most powerful men in the state, had stood up in that locked office and refused him to his face and walked out.

I had spent ten years thinking she had been a reckless girl who got herself into trouble.

I was reading, instead, about the bravest person I have ever known.

I have tried to imagine it, that scene in the locked office, and every time I do, the same thing astonishes me.