They had failed.

The thing they had most wanted to destroy was the one thing they had not been able to touch, because I had gotten her off that train, and into the warmth, and out of their reach.

Whatever else happened when that train reached Minneapolis, we had already won the only victory that mattered.

I want to be clear about the order of my priorities in all of this, because it is easy, telling the dramatic parts, the platform and the photographs and the reckoning at the terminal, to make it sound as though the point was revenge, the satisfying destruction of the people who had wronged me.

It was not.