Three full years passed after the wedding, and they were, against all my private expectations, good years.

I got over my hurt.

I really did, in the ordinary healing way that time makes possible if you let it, the daydream fading from a wound to a scar to finally just a fact of my history.

I moved into my own place.

I built my own life.

And in time I met a genuinely wonderful man of my own, someone who was mine in the plain uncomplicated way I had once wanted Gabriel to be, and I understood, meeting him, that what I had felt at seventeen had been real but had also been young, and that the future I actually wanted had been waiting for me on a road I could not see while I was busy grieving the one that closed.

And Gemma flourished.