I did not tell him whether it made him a bad person, because I did not know, and because I have never believed that fear makes a person wicked, only smaller than they might have been.

That is a distinction I have held onto carefully in the years since, because it would be easy, given how the story turned out, to build myself up by tearing the twenty families down, to cast them as villains so that I could be the hero.

But they were not villains.

They were frightened people making a frightened choice, and the difference between them and me was not that I was braver or better.

The difference, I have come to understand, was simpler and more humbling than that.