I walked out onto the back porch one last time before bed and looked up at the enormous, clear night sky over the valley, the stars scattered across it sharp and bright.

Behind me, inside our warm and light-filled house, my three daughters were sleeping — safe, and whole, and wholly free.

The cold kitchen floor was a thousand miles and a whole lifetime away.

The lies had all been dragged into the light.

The people who had built that nightmare around my children could never reach them again.

Here, in the quiet strength of the life we had built out of the wreckage of the old one, the air was clean, and the doors were unlocked, and the future belonged entirely to us.

I took a long, deep breath of the cool mountain air, and I smiled into the dark — which held nothing frightening anymore, for any of us — and I went back inside to my sleeping children, and I closed the door softly behind me on a world that was, at last, beautifully and unconditionally full of light.