Because underneath the grief and the exhaustion there was one clean, cold thread of something I hadn’t let myself feel in years, and it was closer to fury than to sadness, and it would not let me stop.

Chapter 4 — November 2013

To understand the drive, though, you have to go back further than eight weeks. You have to go back to a specific Thursday night in November of 2013.

I was twenty-three, fresh out of nursing school, working brutal rotations in the ICU.

Victoria was twenty-seven, still two weeks away from the evening she would first cross paths with Harrison Reed, though none of us knew that name yet or how large it would come to loom.

Our grandmother — our father’s mother — had died two weeks before. The house was full of that thick, airless grief that settles over a family after a death, and my father had been drinking.

Not to the point of falling down.