Real strength is quiet.

It is integrity when no one is checking.

It is standing between the powerful and the people they intend to crush.

It is choosing, again, to protect a life — even after your own has been broken past what you thought a person could carry.

Julian had stood on a porch in the rain, once, and thrown my suitcase into the mud, and told me I was a defective product, a woman who could never give anyone a family.

He had been certain that taking my money, and canceling my cards, and forging the record of my own body would leave me broken, and silent, and forgotten — a problem, solved.