The house behind them was the same house — the same stone, the same gardens, the same rooms where so much had been done to her.

She had thought, once, that she would have to sell it, burn it, put an ocean between herself and every wall that remembered her captivity.

She found, in the end, that she did not.

A place is only a cage while someone holds the key from the outside.

She held her own now.

And so the estate that had been the scene of the worst of her life became, slowly, over the seasons that followed, simply her home — proof, like the scars on her wrists, that the things which had been used to imprison her had not, after everything, gotten to keep her.