What had changed my life was quieter than applause.

It was the fact that I no longer flinched when a man raised his voice near me.

It was sleeping in the middle of my own bed.

It was the absence of the small, constant, exhausting work of making myself smaller so that Lucan could feel large — the work I hadn’t even known I was doing until I stopped, and felt how much of me it had been quietly costing all along.

My mother had built Solstice to save companies worth saving.

In the end, the company I saved was my own life, and I did it the same way she’d taught me to do everything: patiently, thoroughly, and with the receipts.