It was nearly perfect.

The only flaw in it, the one thing he had not accounted for, was that I had spent thirty years being underestimated by frightened men in emergency rooms, and I had learned somewhere along the way that the appearance of hysteria and the fact of certainty can live in the very same woman at the very same time — and that a mother who no longer cares how she looks is not, in fact, out of control.

She is the most dangerous thing in the building.

Chapter 5 — He Is Not Burning Her Today