She does not take it for granted.

She sits in that bright room above the river and feels the sun and the quiet and the simple fact of no one wanting her dead, and she knows what she is feeling, and she is grateful for it in a way that only a person who has been truly hunted can be.

I saved her life in a trauma bay in ninety seconds.

But the safety she has now, the real kind, the kind that matches the world — that took a plea agreement and thirty years and six months of healing, and it is hers now, fully, and no one can take it from her, and watching her hold a cup of tea in the afternoon light, entirely unafraid, was worth every hour of the worst year of my life.

She is safe.

It is the only word that matters, and it is, at last, completely true.