I watched him go, up the grand staircase I had polished for eighteen years, and I felt no urge at all to say anything to his retreating back — no last word, no parting shot, nothing.

And I noticed the absence of that urge, and understood what it meant.

The old Helena, the frightened one in the library three days before, might have needed a parting shot; might have needed, on some level, for Justin to acknowledge the wrong he had done, to see her, to grant her at last the recognition his father had always given freely and he never had.

But I did not need that from him anymore, and the not-needing was itself the whole distance I had traveled.

Justin’s opinion of me had ceased, entirely, to have any weight.

He could think me a maid, a nobody, an inconvenient line item, for the rest of his life; it changed nothing, because his seeing me was no longer required for me to be real.