And so a date was set, and on the morning of it Silas sat in the passenger seat of my car outside a tidy house in Indianapolis and very nearly could not make himself get out.

Chapter 23 — The Drive and the Door

“What if she doesn’t want to see me?” he asked, his hands sweating in his lap, staring at the front door of the house as though it might open onto something that could kill him.

I understood that look.

It was not really about Daisy, or not only; it was about the whole shape of his life, the thing he had organized himself around for five years.

If she wanted him, then all the sabotage, all the burned placements, all the leaving-first, had been in service of something real and worth protecting.