She lay there and strained to hear footsteps in the hall, small ones, and heard only the squeak of a cart and the low, satisfied breathing of the man who had married her.

Those were, she thought later, the longest minutes of the entire ordeal — longer than the night she’d first heard the plot, longer than the second attempt, longer than any hour in the dark before or since.

Because for the first time she was not merely afraid of dying.

She was afraid of dying unheard, of the whole careful architecture she’d built in the dark collapsing into nothing because the one person who could open it was late from school.

She had spent her life believing that the truth, properly documented, would always find its way out.

Now she understood how fragile that faith really was — how it had, in the end, always depended on someone being there to carry the truth the last few feet into the light.