The recovery humbled her in ways the crime had not.

She had been, her whole adult life, a woman of formidable competence — someone who walked into rooms and bent them to her will.

And now she had to be taught, by patient young therapists half her age, how to close her fingers around a cup.

There were mornings the frustration of it made her weep, mornings she could not get her mouth to shape a word she could see perfectly in her mind, and the old terror would rise — the sense of being trapped again behind an uncooperative body — and she would have to talk herself down from it breath by breath.

But Sam was always there.

He had appointed himself her audience and her coach, and he took the job with total seriousness.