I want to be honest about the shape of that moment, because people assume terror is loud, and mine wasn’t.

What went through me on that stair wasn’t a scream; it was a terrible clarifying quiet, the quiet of a person who has just understood that no one is coming to save her unless she saves herself first.

My husband was a stranger.

My in-laws were assassins.

The crew answered to the man who’d chartered them, which was Flynn.

There was no one on that boat I could run to.

The nearest land was a smear on a dark horizon and the nearest law was hundreds of miles of black water away.