Something happened to me in that moment that I have never been able to fully describe to anyone who has not lived a divided life, and it was not triumph.

It was integration.

For two years I had kept the two Josephines in separate rooms, and I had grown so used to the partition that I had stopped noticing the effort it took to maintain it — the constant small vigilance of being one woman here and another woman there, never letting the seam show.

And now, standing in a wine-stained gown in the corner of my sister’s wedding with a European bond crisis glowing in my hand, the partition simply dissolved, because there was no longer any reason to hold it up.

The daughter and the Director were, for the first time in my adult life, standing in the same room at the same moment, in front of the same people, and I did not have to choose which one to be or hide either from the other.