Children can smell a parent’s old rage the way they can smell rain coming; it seeps into everything and teaches them that the world is a place to brace against.

I would not do that to them.

Flynn had tried to make them a liability on a balance sheet.

I would make certain that the only inheritance they ever felt from him was the one thing he had accidentally given them: the proof, written into the very structure of their lives, that they came from people who protected their own.

My grandfather had done that for me across the boundary of death.