She had walked into a marriage as a way to escape one man, and walked out of that same marriage’s undoing into a real one, freely chosen, with a man who had earned it a kept promise at a time.

She had said yes once before, in a cathedral, to two hundred people, and meant nothing by it but survival.

This yes, spoken to no audience at all beside a fountain in the failing light, cost her more and was worth more, because it was the first yes of her adult life that no one had coerced, or purchased, or extracted from her under threat.

It was simply hers to give, and she gave it.

There is a particular freedom, she was learning, that has nothing to do with money or power or even safety, though she had all three now.

It is the freedom of a person who gets, at last, to choose — who is handed back the authorship of her own life and discovers she still knows how to write it.