Each one took a piece of the shapeless disaster and made it a defined thing with a name and a rule and a remedy attached.

What Damian and Valentina had done to me was not, in Solene’s language, a heartbreak; it was a series of specific acts, each of which the law recognized and had a response for.

And there is a particular power in that translation for a person who has just been made to feel powerless — the discovery that your private ruin is, from another angle, a case.

A winnable case.

My hands had not shaken the night before, and they did not shake now, but for a different reason: the night before it was the calm of recognition, and now it was the calm of a person who has just been handed the tools.

The ground under my feet, which had not stopped moving since 10:17 the previous night, went still.