I want them ruined in the light.” Bruised, cracked-ribbed, barely a day off the snow that nearly killed her, my wife looked stronger than anyone else in that building, and she chose the harder path, the slower path, the lawful path — not because she was weak, but because she understood, better than I ever had in my old life, that the darkness I came from does not actually punish anyone.

It just makes them vanish, and lets the person who did the vanishing become the very thing they destroyed.

Samantha did not want the Harringtons erased.

She wanted them held accountable, on the record, by the law, which is a far heavier and more permanent thing than fear, and which leaves the person seeking it clean.

“All right,” I told her, and I felt the old world close its door in me for the last time, gently, at the request of the only person who had ever been worth closing it for.

“The light, then.