Every warning I would have given anyone else — wait for the police, don’t go in alone, you don’t know what’s in there — evaporated against the single fact of my daughter’s voice on that phone saying she was cold and scared.

I would have run into fire.

I understood, sprinting up those rotting steps into the dark, something I had only ever known abstractly before: that there is a love that overrides the instinct for self-preservation entirely, that will spend the body without a second’s hesitation, that does not experience courage as courage because courage implies a choice and there was no choice in me at all.

Ottoline had spent forty years, she said, protecting her bloodline.

She had mistaken that cold, calculating possessiveness for the thing a family is supposed to be.

And I think the deepest reason she lost — lost in that chapel, lost in the end — is that she had never once felt what sent me through those doors.