Percy was safe.

Ellard was right there beside them.

Ellard thought, sometimes, in that kitchen, about the two kinds of endings this story could have had.

There was the ending where Percy never spoke — where the boy carried his secret in silence out of fear, the way children so often do, and Radley collected his final transfer and vanished across a border with Tamsyn and the boy, leaving Sidonie to starve in a locked shed once the money stopped.

That ending had been days away.

It had been the plan.