I was finished disappearing, in both directions.

I would be neither the hidden engine nor the false face.

I would just be, at last and in daylight, exactly what I was.

That decision — to take the chairwoman’s seat and not the CEO’s, to be visibly the owner without pretending to be the operator — was the truest measure of how far I had come, and I am proud of it in a quiet way.

Because the easy revenge, the one the old wound in me wanted, would have been to seize everything, to install myself at the head of the table Flynn had sat at, to become the face as well as the foundation, to make them all watch me take the spotlight I had spent seven years handing to a lesser man.

And I could have.