Slowly, I lowered my hand.

And I leaned down, and I blew out the lamp.

Chapter 21 — I Set It Down

The flame went out, and the study dropped into the gray light of the rainy afternoon, and for a moment none of us spoke.

I set the trust document back down on the desk, unburned.

I smoothed it flat with my hand, the red wax seal still intact, and I looked at it for a long moment — at my father’s crest, at the thing that held my fate and my sister’s together in a single sheet of paper — and I understood that I had already decided, somewhere between the flame and her hand on my wrist, and that the deciding had not felt like surrender.

It had felt like setting down a weight I had been carrying so long I had stopped feeling it as weight.