That was never weakness.

It is the oldest strength there is, the one that predates language, and it had been in me the whole time, underneath all the years of being made to feel like nothing.

Lachlan had raised his hand to a twelve-year-old, and the quiet wife he’d thrown away had become, in half a second, an immovable wall of a mother he could not get past.

He lowered his hand.

He had no choice.

There are some things you cannot get through, and a mother’s body between you and her child is the first and last of them.