Not passivity — the opposite of passivity.

It gives you the ability to move all your pieces at once, in silence, so that by the time your opponent understands the game has changed, it is already lost.

Wendy was asleep upstairs, dreaming of her shell company and her downtown condo, and the ground had already, silently, been removed from under her.

I want to say something here about patience, because it is the thing this entire story turns on, and because I think it is one of the most misunderstood virtues there is.

We are taught to think of patience as a passive quality — as waiting, as enduring, as the meek acceptance of what we cannot change.

That is not what patience is, or at least it is not the only thing it is, and it is not the thing that saved my mother.