Saving a child almost always requires exactly that, and it is why it is so rare: not special training or special proof, but the ordinary, difficult courage to believe a hard thing and accept the disruption of acting on it.

She was not a hero because she was extraordinary.

She was a hero because, at the one moment it counted, she declined to look away.

Chapter 3 — A Prison Without Bars

I should explain how two teenage girls came to be trapped in a house that everyone around them believed was ordinary, because the trap was the cruelest and most careful part, and understanding it is the only way the rest makes sense.

Roland Deming was not a man who lost his temper.