The pain in my ribs faded to a kind of distant weather.

The grief, the fear, the wreckage of my marriage — all of it stepped back, and made room for the cold, clean, focused work of assembling the truth into a form that could not be denied.

This was the thing I knew how to do better than almost anyone.

And doing it, that morning, in a hotel room, with bruises still darkening on my skin, was the first time in three years I had felt fully, completely like myself.

They had taken a great deal from me, the Sterlings.