She thought, sometimes, about the word choice, and how completely Dorian had misunderstood what he took from her.

He seemed to believe, even at the end, that his crime could be measured in outcomes — that if he could argue the surgery was medically defensible, or that adoption remained possible, he could somehow reduce the size of what he’d done.

But the harm had never been about the outcome.

A woman who chooses not to have children and a woman who has that decision made for her while she sleeps can arrive at the same childless life and be in entirely different universes, because one of them owns her life and the other has had it taken.

What Dorian stole was not a specific baby, not a particular future.

It was her standing as the author of her own body — the basic human fact that the decisions made about her flesh were hers to make, informed, awake, free.