The girls, who had lost a mother once already and did not know it, but who had come within two days of being handed to a man who thought of them as baggage.

They slept, and they trusted, and they had no idea how close the ground had come to opening under them.

Standing there, watching them breathe, I made myself a promise, and it became the promise that carried me through the next two days and the reception and everything after.

I promised them, silently, in the dark, that they would never carry the weight of this.

That whatever I had to do, however cold I had to become, I would absorb the entire cost of it myself and pass none of it on to them.