He had walked through the trust I extended him as an officer and used it to study my daughter, to map her, to hand her to people who would hurt her on a schedule.

It is one thing to be attacked.

It is another to learn that the attack came through the one wall you never thought to guard, built by the very hands you’d trusted to guard it with you.

For a long time that night I could not separate the two griefs — my daughter’s broken body and my broken faith in the thing I had served my whole life.

And then, somewhere before dawn, I stopped trying to separate them, because I realized they had the same answer.

The same evidence that would free my daughter would expose the traitor.