Survival, I was learning, changes a person.

The woman on that cliff had been fighting only to see the next minute.

The woman in that hospital bed was already thinking three moves ahead.

I have been asked, more than once, how I could bear it — how I could lie in a hospital bed, alive, and choose to let the people who loved me go on believing I was dead, even for two weeks, even for the sake of justice.

And it is a fair question, and it was the hardest part of the whole plan, harder than the funeral itself, because the deception did not only fall on the guilty.

It fell on my innocent friends, who grieved me honestly, and whose grief I had to allow, knowing all the while that a single phone call could end it.