I have had to learn to live beside that, which is not the same as being forgiven and not the same as being absolved, but is, I have come to believe, the honest place for a person like me to stand: not innocent, not the criminal, but the one who saw the first thread pulled and chose a continent rather than a conversation.

I will not look away again.

It is the only amends that means anything — not the guilt, which helps no one, but the vow.

Chapter 7 — What Was Taken

Natasha told me how it had gone after I left, and I will tell it the way she told it — as testimony, not spectacle, the facts of it laid down like stones.

He began checking her phone, demanding her passwords, forbidding her to contact anyone in Nebraska.