The woman weeping on the basement floor.

And now this one — calm, sewn into a coat with a flash drive in the lining, riding toward a confrontation with dangerous men to get her son back.

I understood that they were all me, that none of them had been erased, that the frightened basement woman and the resolved warehouse woman were the same person seen at different depths of the same night.

Fear had not been replaced by courage.

The fear was still there, enormous, riding in the taxi with me.

What had changed was that it no longer ran things.