It waits, folded up and quiet, and it turns out to be exactly the thing you need on the day the ordinary life you built runs headlong into someone like Gavin Prescott.

I had spent years trying to leave that part of myself behind.

In the end it was that part of myself that saved my mother.

I have made a strange sort of peace with that.

My mother, Brenda, was one of the very few people alive who knew the whole of it.

She had written to me all through those years, had waited through the deployments and the silences, had welcomed me home each time without ever asking the questions she knew I could not answer.

She knew what her daughter had been.