Chapter 15 — The Reckoning

Six months later, the morning sun came through the kitchen windows of my new townhouse in a quiet corner of Virginia, and the air in it was clean, and ordinary, and free of the low poison of other people’s whispers.

I had bought the townhouse with my own name on the deed and no one else’s, in a neighborhood where nobody knew our story, and the first thing I did after the boxes were unpacked was put a lock on my own bedroom door — not because I was afraid, but because I could, because it was mine to decide, and there is a particular healing in small sovereignties like that after a year of having none.

Poppy picked her own room and painted it, with my help, a color she chose entirely by herself, an alarming and wonderful shade of purple, and I did not once suggest she pick something else.