She will not grow up, as I nearly did in that other house, believing that power looks like a man in an expensive chair deciding who gets to be afraid.

She will grow up knowing that the loud, smirking, threatening version of strength is not strength at all but its counterfeit — that the men who have to constantly remind you who is in charge are precisely the men who are not, that real authority never needs to announce itself.

I think often about the two men in that hospital room, and the two kinds of power they represented, and how thoroughly one defeated the other.

Trent had spent his life performing strength: the watch, the money, the name, the whisper, the raised hand.