Mabel pulled the little girl in tight against her hip, and she looked at him with eyes that had gone flat and hard as slate, a woman defending the one thing she had left.

“My daughter and I,” she said, each word placed down like a stone, “learned how to survive without you.

A long time ago.

Your promises stopped meaning a single thing to me twenty-six years ago, and they mean less than that now.”

And she stepped back, and she shut the heavy wooden door in his face.

Damian walked back to his car on legs that did not feel like his own, while a specific and terrible timeline began, unbidden, to assemble itself in his mind.