But I was not tragic, and I was not hollow, and I was not, whatever the cameras implied, destroyed.

I was, for the first time in my adult life, free of the thing that had been quietly killing me long before Sennett ever ground up a pill — the family lie, the empire built on a buried body and a bought silence, the marble floors that everyone admired and no one asked about.

All of it was gone now, burned down to the foundation in public, and standing in the ashes I felt something I had not expected to feel.

I felt light.

There was nothing left to protect, which meant there was nothing left to be afraid of.

A person with nothing to hide cannot be blackmailed, cannot be gaslit into managing a secret, cannot be drugged quiet to keep from noticing the rot.