But I kept coming back to the same simple fact, which no arithmetic could get around: if I walked away, he would die, and I would know that I had let him.

I could not build a life for my son on that.

Whatever a good life was worth teaching him, it was not worth teaching him at the price of his mother having left a helpless man to be murdered when she could have stopped it.

So I stayed.

Chapter 11 — A Quiet War

My war against what was being done to Raymond Winslow began without a single raised voice, because a raised voice was the one thing I could not afford.

I had to fight this quietly, invisibly, or not at all.