What Lianna was asking of him was harder and larger and had no closing date.

She was asking him to become, permanently, the kind of company that listens — not to settle a debt to the dead, but to protect the living whose names no one had learned yet.

Corbin thought about that distinction for a long time afterward, because it was the wisest thing anyone had ever said to him, and it came from a woman his company had tried to erase.

Guilt, he came to see, is a fundamentally selfish emotion, however noble it feels.