I decide that now.

And the woman I have decided to be is not the one they described, not the dramatic, unstable, difficult daughter of their long telling, but the one who read the paperwork, and kept the folder, and survived the alley, and stood up in the courtroom, and walked out the door, and never looked back.

That woman is mine.

I made her, out of the wreckage they left.

And no one, ever again, gets to tell me who she is.