My men loved my daughter.

From a careful, respectful distance, without ever intruding on the ordinary life I had built for her, they had watched over Chloe her whole life — knew when she started school, when she graduated, when she left for college.

She was, I realized, looking at them, the one wholly good and innocent thing that our whole bloody shared history had ever produced or protected.

She was the proof that we had gotten out, that we had become men who guarded life instead of ending it.