He Spent a Year Paying a Doctor to Write Down a Fragile, Unstable Version of Me That Didn’t Exist — So When He Finally Set Me Aside, the Whole World Would Believe I’d Simply Come Apart on My Own

And I understand the appeal of that ending.

But it is not the one I got, and I have come to think the one I got is better.

What I felt at that verdict was not fire.

It was air.

Two years of my life had been spent holding my breath — first inside his careful cage, then inside the long grinding work of proving what he’d done — and the verdict was simply the moment I was allowed to exhale.

There is no fireworks in that.