A decision.

Because Chloe’s last instruction to me had been to keep Noah hidden, to raise him in the shadows, to make sure Julian Vance never learned he existed, and for ten years, without even knowing I was doing it, I had obeyed her.

I had kept him safe and quiet and unseen.

But my daughter had written those instructions from inside her fear, in a world where Julian Vance was untouchable and all-powerful and she was a frightened teenager with nothing.

And the world, I realized, sitting there in the dark, was no longer quite that world.