But I kept coming back to Micah asleep on my chest, and to the plain fact that a boy grows up and one day reads the story of how his parents came apart.

I did not want my son to find, at the bottom of that story, a mother who had burned a man alive because she could.

I wanted him to find a mother who used the law, exactly and only as far as the law allowed, and then stopped.

That restraint was not weakness.

It was the hardest strength I had.

Chapter 14 — The Gate