Nora considered this with her chin on her knees.

“What will you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll stand next to you.”

I used to believe that the biggest battles were won with the quiet, unbreakable strength of a foundation that couldn’t be shattered.

The foundation held. That part was true. What I’d actually built on it was a habit — thirty years old, forged at a dinner table, hardened in three hostile countries, and unbelievably effective — of deciding alone, at 0300, what other people were permitted to know.

It wins wars. I have the ribbons.