An hour ago: hide by the restrooms.

Now: baby, I always knew you were extraordinary. The two Damsons could not both be sincere, and the space between them was a full confession, and he had made it himself, in public, in the space of a few minutes, with no help from her at all.

All she had to do was name what the room had already seen.

She had spent five years unable to trust her own perception, gaslit gently into believing that the discomfort she felt was her failing rather than his cruelty.

And now, with the whole ballroom as her witness, she finally had the one thing coercion always steals first — the confidence that she was seeing clearly.

She was.