My Wife Woke in a Hospital Bed, Saw the Tattoo I’d Hidden for Four Years, and Instead of Asking Me to Make Them Disappear, She Said the Six Words That Set Me Free: “No Bodies. Ruin Them in the Light.”

I chose her over them.

I chose rescue before revenge.

I wrapped my wife in my own heavy coat, and I did not go to the main house, and I did not do any of the things the old name would have done.

I carried her to the car and I drove for the hospital with her cold hand in mine, and every mile I made myself a second promise to sit beside the first: that whatever happened to Rosalind Harrington and her children, it would happen in the light, on the record, in a courtroom — not in the dark, where I had lived too long already.

Samantha would not want to be avenged in the dark.