You cannot frighten a woman with the loss of things she has already lost and rebuilt.

That is the terrible freedom the wrongly imprisoned come out with, the freedom Roman himself had handed me without meaning to: once you have lost everything and discovered you are still there underneath it, no one can ever hold everything over you again.

He had spent seven years keeping me slightly afraid.

He looked at me across that ballroom and found, for the first time, a woman who was not afraid of him at all, and I watched him understand, in that instant, that he had already lost, because fear had been the only leash he ever had on me, and he had cut it himself.

“You always did confuse need with want,” I said.