What satisfied me was smaller and infinitely larger: a small house, my own money, the sun on my shoulders, a life in which not one single day was spent managing them, hiding from them, protecting them, or hating them.

Hatred would have been just one more way of letting them live in my head rent-free.

I evicted them entirely.

That is freedom, and it is the only revenge that ever actually heals anything, because it is the only one that ends with you thinking about something other than them.

Chapter 18 — What the Scars Actually Proved

Eight months after that party, I stood beside the ocean, outside a small house I had bought with my own money, and I let the wind off the water touch skin I had kept covered for twelve years.

There were no chandeliers here.