It would have been to complete the erasure the fire had begun, to finish killing a family that had already died once.

That was what Julian had spent his last strength protecting, and what he had entrusted to me, and standing in those quiet rooms full of a dead man’s love, I understood at last that I was not the guardian of a building.

I was the guardian of the last standing evidence that Julian Vance and his family had ever loved one another at all.

And I would not let it fall.