It was not that she wasn’t afraid; she was terrified, I could see it.

Courage is not the absence of fear.

It is a frightened child noticing a loose brass candlestick and understanding, without being told, that her small foot might be the hinge the whole night turned on.

I gave her the nod.

And I trusted her — an eight-year-old — the way you trust the most reliable person in the room, because in that room, she was.

Darius lunged at Weatherby, and the two men went down hard into the pews in a crash of rotten wood.