What shattered was my agreement to see myself through their eyes.

I stopped, in that ballroom, borrowing their opinion of me as my own.

And the moment I stopped, the factual truth I had always known and never quite felt came flooding up into the place where their story had been, and I saw myself, at last, clearly: not the small, lucky, tolerated wife of their convenient tale, but the woman who had been holding their entire world up the whole time, and had, at last, decided to set it down.

Chapter 3 — The Voss Name