What matters is that we both, in the end, arrived.

She at sixty, in a garden by the sea.

Me at twenty-nine, in a marriage that lasted a single violent night.

Both of us free.

Both of us, at last, exactly where we chose to be, having finally remembered the thing that had always been true, and that no one had ever had the right to make us forget.

I picked up my coat, and switched off the lights, and stepped out into the warm afternoon and the clean ocean air, on my way to a dinner in a garden by the sea, where the white roses had bloomed — completely free, entirely whole, and standing, at last, right where I had always belonged.

And if there is one thing I would want a woman to take from all of this — a woman sitting in a beautiful house right now, being told to know her place — it is not the fists, or the forensic audit, or any of the particular weapons that happened to be mine.