It was the hardest and kindest thing, to be willing to be present for someone’s pain without needing to fix it, and most people could not do it, and the ones who could were worth keeping.

She kept Davis after that.

Not as anything with a name.

As one of the few people on earth who had been in the worst hour of her life and knew, without being told, how to simply sit beside the aftermath of it.

Chapter 18 — Lawful Weight

The law took Richard Sterling apart the way the audit would have taken his books apart, slowly, thoroughly, and without any of the drama he had built his crime around.

There was no reckoning scene, no confrontation in which Maya stood over him and said the cutting thing; she was never offered one and would not have wanted it.