He looked at it the way a man looks at a door he has kept locked for a decade, knowing that on the other side of it is everything he has been running from, and knowing, too, that the time for running is finally over.

I understood his fear.

I had carried the same object for ten years, and it had weighed on me the same way, though for different reasons.

We were two people who had each, alone, been guarding a piece of the same terrible thing, and it was about to become, at last, a thing we faced together.

Chapter 11 — Who’s Julian

Grace had been watching all of this with her serious, careful eyes, looking from one shaken adult to the next, and now she spoke into the heavy quiet.