She could not have known, saying it, that she was planting the seed that would one day save her own life.

And Chloe, when she found the terrible box and understood dimly what it meant, had reached back to that gentle sentence her mother had given her, and had taken it not as a comforting story but as an instruction, a job, a thing to actually do.

She had decided to be the one who brought the truth.

There is something almost unbearably tender in that, in a child taking a parent’s small kindness and turning it, years later, into the exact act that returns the kindness a thousandfold.

Elena had given Chloe a sentence about angels to help her sleep.