He said I was helpless.

I built a firm that helps other people.

He said I was nothing without the family name.

I put my own name in gold on the door and made it mean something he never made his mean.

That is not revenge, because revenge is about him, and this was never about him.

It was about reclaiming the truth of who I was from the lie he had installed in me — proving to the one person whose belief mattered, me, that the helpless woman he had described had never existed, that she was a fiction manufactured to keep me compliant, and that the real woman, the one who had been there underneath all along, was someone who could build a life with her own two hands out of the very wreckage that was meant to bury her.

The firm was not my revenge on Roman.