Her father had spent ten years trying to convince the world she could not be trusted with her own choices.

She stood in the garden of the house he had once caged her in, in a sleeveless dress with her scars bare to the evening, and made the largest choice of her life, clearly and gladly and entirely on her own.

It was the most sane thing she had ever done.

He slipped the ring onto her finger and held her, and beneath the wide autumn sky the rumors and the false headlines and the long shadow of everything her father had been faded into a silence that, at last, held nothing in it to be afraid of.

They had not only survived a monstrous family.

Together, out of the wreckage of it, they had built something no one would ever be able to take from them again.