But I had learned by then that the spotlight was never the thing I actually wanted, and that chasing it would have been just another way of letting Flynn’s values run my life — measuring myself by his yardstick, the one that says the person in front is the person who won.

I did not need to be in front.

I had never needed to be in front.

What I had needed, all along, was to stop being hidden — to be seen and known as exactly what I was, no more and no less, the owner who built this and hired good people to run it and answers to no one.

There is a version of freedom that looks like grabbing the crown, and there is a truer version that looks like no longer needing one, and I had finally arrived at the second.

I put a professional in the operator’s chair, and I sat where the real power had always sat, in the open at last, and I found that I did not miss the crown at all, because I had stopped believing the story in which the crown was the thing worth having.