“Do you hear me?

Nothing!” I looked at him, held down between the two things he had tried and failed to destroy — my rescuer and my sister — and I thought of my son and daughter breathing upstairs.

“I already have more than you will ever possess,” I said.

And I meant every word.

Chapter 16 — The Trial

I spent nine days in that hospital, healing from the frostbite and the delivery, and my children spent longer, upstairs, fighting their own quiet battles — Maya needed help with her lungs for a while, and Liam fought off a small infection — and both of them, my two-and-a-half and three-pound fighters, won.

The state investigation, once it finally looked, found that Marcus had been telling the plain truth five years earlier.