Leon lunged for the computer.

The investigators were between him and the desk before he had taken a full step, and they held him there, and my father’s recorded voice went on, steady and unhurried.

“And if you have hurt your sister,” my father said, “understand that she is holding more than what is in that safe.

She always was.”

Leon’s eyes went, involuntarily, to my split lip.

And I watched the last piece of it arrive in him — the understanding that the blow he’d landed in the church that morning had not frightened me into anything, had not made me smaller or more manageable.