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.”

She defeated her mother by refusing to become her.

I had never once, in all my years of power, managed anything half so hard.

Chapter 16 — The Crimson Shadow’s Last Act

I could have done more.

I want to be honest about that, because the honesty is the whole point of what I chose instead.

In the world I came from, what the Harringtons did to Samantha would have ended in a darkness from which no one returns, and I had the means, still, that morning, to make it end that way, and some old broken part of me wanted to.

Instead I did what my wife asked, which was harder, and better, and which finally set me free.