He taught me my place.

It just was not the one he meant.

Chapter 20 — Into the Sunlight

I walked down the terrace steps into the warm afternoon sunlight, and behind me, the workers carried the last broken pieces of that wooden beam toward a dumpster, and I did not turn around to watch them go.

I did not need to.

It was already gone from me, in every way that mattered, long before it was carried out that door.

I have thought, since, about the woman who stood tied and hurt in that ballroom a year earlier, and about the woman who walked down those terrace steps into the sun, and I have come to understand that they are the same woman, and that this is the most important thing of all.