But the world she lost had been a cage lined with her family’s secrets, and the life she walked into, poor and disowned and free, was the first one that had ever actually been hers.

She is not the hero of this story.

But she is proof of something I have come to believe: that it is never too late to stop being a coward, and that the price of stopping, however ruinous it looks, is always, always less than the price of the cowardice would have been in the end.

Mabel finished her degree.

And she took over the regional management of Damian’s agricultural land holdings — not as the founder’s wife, a title she rejected flatly, but as an independent, salaried executive with full operational authority, hired for the sharp, unbeaten mind that four years of injustice had failed to dull.

She was, at last, running things, the way she had said she would at seventeen.