Not hoping to be safe, not working toward safe, not safe-for-now.

Safe.

The kind of safe you can finally exhale into.

I had not known, until that moment on the porch, how much of me had still been braced.

Chapter 16 — The Hard-Won Ordinary

I want to tell you about the recovery, because the recovery is the part that matters most, and it is the part these stories usually skip.

The trial ends, the villains fall, and we are told everyone lived happily ever after, as though safety and healing were the same thing.

They are not.