In the light, it turned out, they all believed each other.

Chloe’s jaw healed completely, under the care of the finest reconstructive surgeons in the country — quietly arranged and quietly paid for by a group of men she thought of only as her father’s distant old friends.

Her smile came back.

Fierce, and bright, and entirely unafraid.

“Dad,” she said to me that morning, over her tea, in a thoughtful voice.

“The news kept calling the people who helped us ‘ghosts.’ They said someone pulled a whole network of corrupt people into the daylight in a matter of days, and nobody can figure out who.” She looked at me, steady and clear.