The defining sound of my life turned out to be the ones that came after: the shriek of bending steel, the crack of a breaking lock, and the rush of warm air as a man I had wronged reached through the dark to pull me and my children into the light.

Victor thought the cold would stop my heart.

Instead, in that frozen vault, two brand-new hearts started to beat.

He thought my sister’s silence would leave me alone in the world, and it was my sister who sent the man who saved me.

He thought he had authored a flawless, tragic ending, and had accounted for everything.

He forgot only one thing, the one thing men like him always forget: that I survived.

And a woman who survives always, always holds the pen — and she gets to write her own ending.

This is mine.

I have written it in warmth, and in light, and in the sound of my children laughing in a house with all its doors open.

Let him sit in his cell and wonder how the arithmetic came out so wrong.

I am too busy living the ending I wrote to spare him another thought.