When I walked out twelve hours later, Harrison was waiting in the corridor. He didn’t offer me cheap diner soup. He handed me a strawberry hard candy, unwrapping it with quiet reverence.

“Spoils of war, Commander,” he said.

Six months later, I stood at a podium under the flash of the global press, in a brilliant white suit, my posture unbroken.

“Today, Sterling Group is donating ten million dollars to launch the Winter’s Dawn Women’s Medical Advocacy Foundation,” I announced. “We will fight to ensure no woman is ever stripped of her bodily autonomy on a hospital bed.”

Later, on the helipad above a golden Manhattan sunset, Harrison stood beside me.

“I don’t need you to depend on me, Elena,” he said, the wind catching his coat. “But if it ever gets lonely at the top, my castle is right next to yours.”

I looked at the horizon, the ice around my heart finally beginning to melt. “You’ll have to walk fast to keep up with me, Harrison.”

I am Elena Vance. And in this city, my name is the verdict.

THE END.