The comfort had been built on a grave and a cell.

The very cabin the state police surrounded that night had been purchased with the proceeds of a woman’s wrongful conviction, and every night Richard had slept soundly in it, a child who should have been sleeping in her mother’s house slept down the hall, kept close not out of love but as a living component of the scheme.

Whatever comfort he had extracted from those five years, he would now trade it, all of it, for a cell of his own, and there was a rightness to that exchange that needed no embellishing.

The man who had engineered a cage for an innocent woman would spend the rest of his life inside one built for the guilty.