None came.

The silence where his judgment used to be was so total it rang.

I understood, dimly, that this was what the rest of my life was going to feel like at first: not liberation but vertigo, the disorientation of a person who has been leaning so long on a wall that she’s forgotten how to stand when it’s gone.

And I understood, too, that I would have to learn to stand anyway, quickly, starting now — because the wall I’d been leaning on had turned out to be a man who wanted me dead.

I let myself into the silent house and went straight to Devon’s office, and I began to search.

Chapter 6 — The Passcode Was My Birthday