And that — the not letting go — was the exact moment that Margaret stopped being a woman who suspected something and became a woman who knew.

She has said since that she felt, in that second, something she had not felt in years: the specific flat calm that used to come over her in a trauma bay when everything went wrong at once.

Not courage.

The opposite of feeling.

A kind of clean, cold competence that arrives when the situation gets simple enough.

She reached into her bag with her free hand and took out her phone.