But it gets easier, the way anything gets easier once you finally understand it was never a fact about you.
It was only ever a story someone needed you to believe.
Slowly, I learned to live in my own skin again without flinching.
I learned to want things out loud.
I enrolled in things, read things, made decisions without first running them through the filter of a man’s moods.
And when I was ready — fully ready, on nobody’s timeline but my own — I made a choice that was entirely mine to make, with doctors who told me the truth: I would have a child through donor treatment.
Not to prove anything to Weston.
Not to answer the sentence he’d written.
Simply because I wanted to, and because my body, it turned out, had never once stood in the way.
Chapter 18 — A Future No One Could Own