It gave me the power to make sure that Samuel and Charlotte and Jonathan would not simply vanish — that their names would go on meaning something in the world, that some good would grow out of the worst thing that had ever happened, that the road which took my children might, because of them, become safer for other people’s children.

The money could not bring them back.

But it could make their memory into something that would outlast me, and outlast the people who had abandoned me, and go on protecting children long after all of us were gone.

And I had already, quietly, over six silent months, decided exactly what I was going to do with every cent of it.

Chapter 9 — By Noon