It was a coherent theory.

It was also completely wrong, and the proof of its wrongness is that I am sitting on a sunlit patio, free, with my daughter, while the woman who held that theory is on probation and barred by law from coming near either of us.

Because it turns out that the things Evelyn thought were the sources of a person’s power are only ever its trappings.

The real thing lives somewhere she never thought to look, somewhere that cannot be reached by any theft, any cancellation, any note left on a nightstand: it lives in who a person actually is, in her training and her character and her refusal to accept the smallness others assign her, in the resolve that remains when every external prop has been kicked away.