She had been able to spare her son.

For tonight, in this one cabin, that was going to have to be enough, and it was, it was more than enough, it was everything.

She held him and understood that something had quietly reversed itself inside her in the last hour, some polarity of fear that had been stuck the wrong way round for eighteen months.

All that time, loving Leo had felt like exposure, like having handed a hostage to a world that had already shown it would take what she loved; every ordinary danger of his childhood, every fever and bicycle and high shelf, had seemed to her proof that caring for someone was only lining up the next loss.

And so she had tried to love him carefully, from a crouch, braced against the blow.