My father had spent his life declining to perform it, carrying the real thing so quietly that his own daughter never saw it.

And when the two finally met, the performance did not last thirty minutes against the substance.

That is the truth I want threaded through every year of Lily’s childhood, until she could not doubt it if she tried: that the people worth trusting with power are most often the ones who least need you to notice they have it.

Her grandfather taught me that in a single afternoon, with a tattoo he never used and a weapon he set down.

I intend to spend her whole childhood teaching it to her.