And in the end the paperwork was enough.

It is a strange thing to be saved by the least romantic part of your own character — but I have made my peace with it.

The careful, boring, receipt-keeping woman my family found so easy to overlook is the woman who is free today.

The others are not.

There is a thin surgical scar beneath my right knee now, a pale line where the bone was set.

For a while I hated it, and hid it, and felt it as a mark of what had been done to me.