I weighed all of that, seriously, because I am not a dramatic woman by nature and I did not want a spectacle for its own sake.

But I kept coming back to the same place.

Julian Vance had built his entire defense, for ten years, out of darkness and silence.

Silence was his weapon; it was the thing he had used to threaten my daughter and the thing he had counted on to protect himself.

To fight him in the quiet, private, confidential way, on his terms, in the shadows where he was strongest, felt to me like agreeing to fight him with his own weapon in his own hand.

The one thing a man like that truly cannot survive is daylight.