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.”

In the old life, I had believed that fear was the ultimate instrument — that if people were afraid enough of you, you could make them do anything, and for a while that is even true.

But fear is a terrible foundation, because it is unstable and it is temporary and it makes enemies faster than it makes order; the frightened are always waiting for the moment your back is turned, and they lie to you constantly because the truth is dangerous to tell a man who frightens them.

It took me years to understand that everything I had built on fear was quietly rotting from beneath, and that the thing which actually held, the thing that could not be lied to or waited out or overthrown, was not fear at all.

It was information.