And from those bushes, he had watched two strange men help a struggling woman in a white gown down the outside cellar stairs, while Delilah unlocked the heavy door and told them to hurry, to get her inside before anyone saw.

Mason had been carrying that memory for three weeks, terrified, telling no one, the way a frightened child does — certain, in the particular logic of childhood, that he would somehow be the one who got in trouble.

But that morning, at the bus station, he saw Vivienne’s face, and he recognized it.

It was the face of the woman in the white gown.

And whatever fear had kept him silent for three weeks broke, all at once, in the face of seeing her alive, and he turned and ran the whole way home to his father, and said the sentence that ended Delilah’s thirty-year campaign in a single breath.