That pause was the sound of a cage dissolving, slowly, from the inside.

It does not happen in a courtroom or a ballroom.

It happens in a hundred small moments, over a long time, as a person relearns the thing that was trained out of her — that her life is hers, that her choices are hers, that she does not need anyone’s permission to exist.

Watching Yvaine relearn it was the truest happy ending I have ever witnessed, and it looked like nothing at all: a woman deciding, by herself, to cut her own hair.

As for me, I went back to my agency.

I never sold it.