And the one isolation Roland could not achieve, however hard he tried, was to isolate us from each other.

We were two, and we were the same, and each of us was a witness the other could not be talked out of.

When Roland told me I was worthless, I had Nora’s eyes to tell me otherwise.

When he told Nora that no one would believe her, she had me, who believed her completely.

We were, for each other, the reality check that isolation is designed to destroy — the second mind that kept the first from being fully rewritten.

He could take our phones and our uncle and our credibility, but he could not take the fact that there were two of us who knew, with certainty, that the other was not crazy, not bad, not deserving of any of it, because we had watched it happen to a person we loved and knew, beyond any lie, that she had done nothing to earn it.