There was a way out of that house that Commander Hayes had known about and the men in the dark had not, and we took it — my mother and my brother and Lucas and Hayes and I, out through the back and away, until the sound of the violence faded behind us into the ordinary sound of a hard rain.

My wedding dress caught and tore on a doorframe as we went, and I ripped the ruined fabric loose and kept moving, and found that I did not mourn it even slightly.

My mother, halfway out, unclasped the heavy pearls at her throat and let them fall, because they were only weight now, and I understood that too.

We were shedding, as we ran, the whole apparatus of the life my father had built — the gown, the pearls, the name on the hospital wings — and keeping only what was actually worth carrying, which was each other, and a steel box full of the truth.

There was a boat, at the end of it, on the dark river, and Captain Miller waiting at it — Miller, who had served under Vance twenty years before and never forgotten what the man was, and who had gotten himself to that dock ahead of us to make sure we had a way through.

We climbed aboard, soaked and shaking and alive, all of us, and the engine caught, and the boat pushed out into the current, and the burning shape of the house fell away behind us into the rain.