It moves patiently, in silence, gathering everything it needs before it is ever visible at all, and by the time the guilty realize the cold is in the room, the warrants are already signed.

My mother and sister had spent my whole life reading my calm as softness, and had built their entire crime on that reading.

What they did not understand was that they had never once, in all those years, seen me truly cold — because I had never before had a reason to be.

They were about to learn that the quiet man they had dismissed was quiet the way a frozen lake is quiet: not because there is nothing underneath, but because what is underneath is very deep, and very hard, and will hold anything you are foolish enough to walk out onto it.

Chapter 5 — The Hospital

I did the only things that mattered in that moment, in the right order, without letting the cold thing in me interfere with the warm one.