And then, in a single glance at a single page, it began to give them back.

I did not throw that paper in the bin.

I held it up to the light.

And everything that followed — the truth, the pardon, the reckoning, the whole of my freedom — flowed from the fact that a woman who had been punished for seeing too clearly refused, even then, even broken, to stop seeing.

Chapter 12 — Arthur Vance

At that moment the study doors swung open, and an old man stepped through them, leaning heavily on a mahogany cane.