It only means you get to keep waking up.

Two years to the day after I found her in those woods, she asked me to walk the forest path with her, and we carried little Naomi against her chest, and she laid a small bundle of dried flowers at the roots of that great pine tree.

“I used to think I would hate this place forever,” she said.

“But I nearly died here — and this is also where the man who believed me found me.” And I have come to believe that is the whole of what I have to offer anyone who reads this: that sometimes a person does not need you to solve their every problem, or slay their every dragon.

Sometimes they need only one voice, in a whole town of louder ones, willing to step forward and say, I am here, and I am listening to you. They took Vivienne’s freedom, and tried to take her name, and her land, and her future.