It is a bitter thing to realize you spent years apologizing for the very people who would, in the end, be the only ones to come when you called.

Because here is what I had gotten exactly wrong, all those years: I had judged my family by the fear their name once caused, and concluded that the name meant danger, meant crime, meant something to hide.

But the fear was never the essence of it.

The essence of it was underneath the fear, and it was this — that in my family, no one stands alone.

That whatever else the Voss name had ever meant, it had always, first and last, meant that if anyone laid a hand on one of us, five people would come through any door in the world to stand between them and further harm.