That is the only thing that will ever matter to me.

I meant it as completely as I have ever meant anything.

Because in the reordering of that single night, all my old accounts had been settled and closed.

The heartbreak of the blue velvet box, which I had carried quietly for years, dissolved entirely in the light of what I now understood that box had actually meant: not a rejection of me, but the beginning of a rescue of my sister.

The jealousy that had whispered to me in the dark at twenty-two, the ugly suspicion I had nursed and been ashamed of, was revealed to have been not just wrong but precisely backwards, pointed at a hero and calling him a villain.