I had spent my life ashamed of the fear the name caused in strangers, and completely blind to the loyalty it guaranteed to its own.

Preston taught me the difference, the night he raised his hand to a woman he believed had no one, and discovered she had five.

The name I had been ashamed of was the name that saved me.

And I stopped, that year, apologizing for it, because I finally understood that it had never been a shadow at all.

It had been, the entire time, a shelter — and I had been standing in it, ungrateful, my whole life, mistaking the roof over my head for a cloud.

Chapter 18 — The Beam