I counted my own breaths to keep them slow and even, in case anyone looked in.

I listened to the weather come up outside — the wind climbing, the first hard spatter of rain on the glass, the deep new roll of a sea starting to turn mean — and I understood that the storm they’d chosen as their cover was now my clock, ticking down toward the moment Flynn would come to walk me to the rail.

And somewhere in that half hour, lying still, I stopped being afraid and started being angry, and the anger was better.

It was clean.