It was retrieving the woman who had existed before him, the one with her own name and her own worth and her own future, and welcoming her home.

Every form I signed, every account I changed, every teacher and doctor and colleague who learned to call me Sterling, was a small brick in the rebuilding of a self I had spent eleven years dismantling.

My aunt gave me a fortune.

But she also, by leaving it in the Sterling name, gave me back my own, and I have come to think that was the more valuable gift of the two.

I set my pen down and looked at that message for a long moment, and I let myself feel the full distance I had traveled.