It was two daughters I had fought a war to bring into the world, and a widowed general two houses down who had chosen us, and whom we chose, out of nothing but the decision to.

Nobody handed it to me.

Nobody could take it away, because it did not rest on anyone’s approval or anyone’s biology or anyone’s permission.

I had built it, board by board, the way Arthur had once built the systems that carried medicine across the world, and a thing you build yourself, with your own hands, out of your own choosing, belongs to you in a way that nothing you are merely given ever can.

Chapter 17 — Five Years Later

Five years after the final gavel came down in that chilly courthouse corridor, I stood at the kitchen island of a house I had built from the ground up, in the rolling green hills outside Charlottesville, Virginia, pouring fresh orange juice into two small glass cups.