He had forgotten, somewhere in those six years, the one fact that undid everything: that the quiet woman across the table from him, the one signing where she was told, had grown up at her father’s elbow learning how to protect the thing he built — and that she was, all along and to the bone, her father’s daughter.

I keep the compass where I can see it.

The needle does not argue and it does not flatter; it only points, steadily, at true north, the way my father did, the way I mean to.

My father used to tell me that a compass is not brave and it is not clever; it simply refuses, every second of its life, to point anywhere but true, and that a person who can manage the same thing will never truly be lost, whatever else they lose along the way.

Outside my windows the city moves, and the water of the Sound catches the light, and the company my father built runs honest and open beneath my hands.

I am not running from anything anymore, and I am not carrying anything I was never meant to carry.

The sky is clear.

The company is secure.

And the controls of my life belong, at last and without condition, to me.