He had forgotten that the truth is not so easily burned.

Chapter 16 — Not Easily Burned

He had underestimated the thing that runs between a mother, and a grandmother, and a child — a bond he could not see and did not believe in and never thought to plan around, and it was that bond, in the end, and not his cleverness, that decided how the story went.

It reached through a little girl and would not be silenced.

It put an old woman on her feet in a crowded chapel when every rule of that room said to sit down and be quiet.