That is the thing no one tells you about finally becoming who you are.

It is not only a homecoming.

It is also a small funeral, for the self you built to survive the years when you could not yet be the real one.

I felt both of those at once, crossing that floor: the grief and the arrival, folded together, one step at a time, toward the man who had never once, in six years, bothered to find out which of the two women was real.

Gavin froze on the stage.