But Natasha understood something about her own particular healing that I found breathtaking: that to flee the ranch in fear would be to let Brock keep it, and keep her, from a prison cell — to concede that the place he had ruined was now his forever, marked, unusable, a wound in the map she must forever route around.

She refused him that.

She decided, instead, to take the very ground he had used to break her and grow something on it, and there is a kind of courage in that which is quieter and deeper than any escape.

She did not deny what had happened there.

She did not pave it over or pretend it away.

She dismantled the cage board by board, in daylight, with her own decisions, and then she planted lavender in the dirt where it had stood, so that the place of the worst thing became, by her own hand, the place of something living.

That is not forgetting.