What I wanted was exactly what I got: for the harm to be documented, and answered, and made to matter in the one arena where it could change my life — and then for it to heal, and fade, and leave no trace, so that I could walk into the rest of my life unmarked by him.

I feel no hatred toward Roman now, and I take no pleasure in imagining his three years in a state facility.

Hatred and vengeful pleasure are both ways of keeping a person close, of letting them go on occupying rooms in you, and I evicted Roman from every room.

What I feel instead is the clean, quiet, enormous relief of a woman who was told for nine years that her silence was surrender, and who proved, in the end, that it had been something else entirely — the deep breath a person takes before she stands, and stops asking, and simply takes back what was always, in law and in truth and in the deed her grandmother left her, her own.

Roman had believed, for nine years, that fear and a loud voice would keep me silent forever — that if he could just take my voice away, he would be left with a woman too small and too frightened to ever stand against him.