No one can be allowed to hold your life in their hands.

Not a rival.

Not a friend.

Not a sister you met six months ago.

Burn it, and the trigger disappears.

Burn it, and the ledgers stay buried, and the forty million stays where it is, and the girl goes back to being a girl in a uniform, and you remain exactly what you have always been.

The voice was persuasive.

It had always been persuasive; it was, in a sense, the voice of my father, installed in me so early and so thoroughly that for most of my life I had mistaken it for my own.