I could feel he was in a hurry and I didn’t know why.” Now we knew why.

His company was drowning, and he needed her property to keep it afloat, and he had run out of time to be patient.

Which meant, Victoria said, that we had run out of time to be slow.

There was a grim clarity in that discovery that actually steadied all three of us, because it turned a fog into a map.

Up to that point, part of what had made the situation so frightening was its shapelessness, the sense that Gavin might want anything, might do anything, that we were up against a mood rather than a plan.