And I put one heel in front of the other and walked the other way, toward Lucas, toward the life I had chosen instead of the one I had been assigned, and I did it with tears standing in my eyes and my chin up and no one’s arm to lean on.

I have thought since that this is the truest test of whether you actually love someone, or merely love what loving them gets you: whether you will walk toward them across a room that has turned against you, alone, with nothing to gain and your family’s approval to lose.

I walked.

Everything good that my life became, it became because a frightened woman in a broken-stemmed bouquet decided, in the loneliest thirty seconds of her life, to keep walking toward the right man anyway.

The swords came after.

But the choosing came first, and the choosing was mine.