Sato recognized, to preserve what she preserved, to lock the door she locked, then fewer girls would have to be as lucky as we were.

That is the whole of it.

We could not go back and make our own childhood less dependent on luck.

But we could spend our father’s money making other children’s rescues less dependent on it, and that, it turned out, was the thing that let me stop feeling merely lucky and start feeling, at last, useful — the thing that turned what had happened to us from a wound we had barely survived into a reason other children might not have to survive it at all.

Chapter 20 — It Meant Peace