My name was my own again.

My dignity was intact.

My future belonged, wholly and only, to me.

And as the first stars came out over the Riverton skyline, I knew, with total and quiet certainty, the thing it had taken me a year in the dark and ten minutes in a courtroom and six months of weightless freedom to understand: that my life had not ended in that courtroom, the way Roman and Marion had meant for it to.

It had, at long and unlikely last, begun.